This article appeared in the Business Day this morning http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/national.aspx?ID=BD4A245132. A study conducted by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) has found that the flow from the rural areas to the urban areas has slowed down and in some cases people are returning to the rural areas because the cost of living in urban areas and unemployment is too high.
(There is a definition of a rural area: a sparsely populated area in which people farm or depend on natural resources, including the villages and small towns that are dispersed through these areas, also includes large settlements in the former homelands, created by apartheid removals (South African Rural Development Framework 1997:9).
One other interesting observation is that the location of government offices also influenced migration patterns. Also "allocation of social grants and low-income housing often encouraged people to stay where they were, rather than move to the cities. The same scenario was observed when government built houses on cheaper land outside the cities."
The BBBEE tie in lies in the enterprise development and CSI elements. There is a great deal of emphasis on rural development in these two elements specifically. This study does show that if there is going to be corporate involvement in these areas then they will only work if the government has an acceptable presence there. Perhaps this CSI would best delivered as a Public Private Partnership.
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