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The Neighbourhood
Development Programme (NDP) Unit was
established in 2006 and is responsible for managing the Neighbourhood
Development Partnership Grant (NDPG).
The NDPG is
driven by the notion that public investment and funding can be used
creatively to attract private and community investment to unlock the
social and economic potential in targeted underserved neighbourhoods,
generally townships.
This in
turn will not only improve the quality of life of residents but also
contribute to South Africa’s economic performance.
The
purpose of the grant is to therefore fund, support and facilitate the
planning and development of neighbourhood development programmes and
projects that provide catalytic infrastructure to leverage such third
party public and private sector investment for future and more
sustainable development.
The NDP
Unit is responsible for:
- The
management of the NDPG, and includes a
planning grant, for Technical Assistance (TA) and a Capital Grant
(CG).
- The
NDP Unit also performs support and knowledge management activities
and is currently working on a programme referred to as the
Sustainable Cities Collective (SCC)
- The NDP Unit
recently joined the Inter-Governmental Relations (IGR) division at National Treasury to work in
conjunction with the City Support Programme.
The strategic role of urban centres in enabling the necessary conditions for achieving key
government outcomes is well documented locally and internationally. During 2011/12 the NDP evaluated
the performance of the NDP grant and as a result embarked on a process
of strategic planning to deepen value for money and long term impact. The result was the formulation of a
new strategy, known as the Urban Networks Strategy (UNS)
which is a pro-poor/pro-growth investment approach.
The strategy which is aimed at facilitating the
eradication of spatial inequality to enable the creation of liveable,
sustainable, resilient, efficient and integrated human settlements. The focus of this strategy is to
shift infrastructure investments towards the creation of efficient and
effective urban centres through an approach of spatial targeting
of public investment, primarily infrastructure. The Urban Network is a city-wide
interconnected hierarchy of strategic nodes and public transport links
between and within nodes. It
consists of primary and secondary networks that interconnect at strategic
nodes known as urban hubs, which are located within marginalised areas,
typically townships.
The new strategy is reflected in the
amendment of the 2013/2014 DORA NDPG Framework which
states that future NDPG allocations will be
focused on municipalities and projects that align with the NDPG’s prioritisation criteria. These for example
include population densities, levels and diversity of economic activity,
concentration of poverty and the presence of connectivity networks i.e.
public transport. The application of these criteria across the NDPG portfolio of municipalities has resulted in
the identification of 18 urban municipalities and
include South Africa’s larger urban centres as well as key
regional service centres.
While the 18 NDPG
funded urban municipalities are places of significant socio-economic
development and growing populations they continue to suffer from severe
inequality which is clearly represented in their spatial form. This
perpetuates cities that are:
- Exclusionary (spatial patterns of
access to services and opportunity)
- Inefficient (growing fiscal and
economic costs in supporting the current spatial form and design)
- Unsustainable (due to severe
environmental and social risks)
The focus of this Urban Networks Strategy, as
the name implies, is to shift infrastructure investments towards the
creation of efficient and effective urban centres that will increase
economic growth, create employment and increase access to urban
amenities, especially for the poor located in marginalised settlement
areas, such as townships. The NDP will work
in partnership with other strategic spatial, transit orientated grants
including the Public Transport Infrastructure and Systems (PTIS) Grant and Urban Settlement Development Grant
(USDG) to support the implementation of
projects across the urban network.
The balance of the
municipalities in the NDPG portfolio has been
classified as rural NDP
municipalities.
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