Government-funded programmes and services for vulnerable - Unicef

Department of Social Development
This amounts to 21 per cent of all children in South Africa.
The General Household Survey results were analysed by the Children’s Institute at the
University of Cape Town, which observed that (Meintjies & Hall 2010):
● between 2002 and 2008, the number of orphans increased by almost 1 million;
● 63 per cent of orphans are paternal orphans, in other words, they have a living
mother;
● the number of double orphans more than doubled between 2002 and 2008, from
350 000 to 850 000.
The national adoption programme has not been able to attract enough prospective
adoptive parents. 47
Reunification services are essentially non-existent. Because of the shortage of social
workers and the high caseload that they carry, there has been a neglect of adequate
reunification services by social workers. Placements of children in alternative care
are meant to be temporary placements and the child and family should be reunified.
However, these placements have tended to become permanent because the child–family
relationship has not been restored (Padayachee 2005).
The acute shortage of social workers and auxiliary social workers has resulted in a severe
lack of capacity to respond to the demand for social welfare services by vulnerable
children and their families (Loffell et al. 2008). Statutory care and protection services
are insufficient because they, like prevention and early intervention services, are also
insufficiently resourced. The primary service providers of statutory care and protection
services are NGOs and community-based organisations, although government is
responsible for funding these services. NGOs are not fully funded to provide the services,
which impacts negatively on the quality and sustainability of social services (Barberton
2006; DoSD 2009d). These barriers have largely been brought about by insufficient
resource allocation for social services over a protracted period of time. It is worrying
that we are not seeing a turn in the tide of resource allocation for social services. Two
key costing reviews of the funding that is necessary, in comparison to the funds that
have been made available for the comprehensive developmental social welfare service
contained in the Children’s Act, have both found that provincial budgets are inadequate to
deliver the prescribed statutory services.
An analysis of 2006 provincial DoSD budgets by Barberton (2006) revealed that the
provinces had underfunded their social services obligations in terms of the Child Care
Act, No. 74 of 1983 (essentially the same as the obligations in terms of the Children’s
Act) by 50.5 per cent. Projecting these figures onto the Children’s Act would leave the
Children’s Act mandate underfunded by 53.3 per cent. Barberton also found that there are
huge discrepancies between the provinces in the level of funding for social services, and
that this discrepancy is likely to continue.
A subsequent analysis of the adequacy of the 2010/11 provincial budgets by Budlender
and Proudlock (2010) shows a continued significant shortfall in ensuring that vulnerable
children in need of the Children’s Act statutory services in fact receive them. The authors
conclude that the funds allocated to the whole Social Welfare Programme by provincial
47 DoSD Annual Report, 31 March 2008
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