Status of Government’s Poverty Reduction Programmes - Focus on DST’s Social Impact Programme

Poverty and unemployment remain South Africa’s main challenges, even with the
vigorous deployment of many government poverty alleviation policies and programmes (see Section 2). Continued existence of these challenges will make the South African government fall short of its Millenium Development goal to reduce poverty and unemployment by half by 2014. The challenges prompted the National Advisory Council on Innovation (NACI), through its Innovation for Development (INNO4DEV) subcommittee, to commission this study.
The study was initially planned as a survey of all existing government poverty
alleviation programmes. It was soon realized that this was a huge and complex
task, and accordingly the scope of work was narrowed down to the effectiveness
of the Department of Science and Technology’s (DST) Science and Technology
for Social Impact (STSI) programme, which comprises the Sustainable Livelihoods
and Sustainable Human Settlements sub-programmes. The core mandate of these
sub-programmes is to promote the development and use of science, engineering
and technology (SET) in introducing and demonstrating innovative social solutions
that have potential to contribute to poverty reduction. 

The objectives of the study were to:
 Identify existing government poverty alleviation programmes and policies with
a special focus on the DST’s STSI programme and then evaluate the effectiveness of the programme in terms of successes and challenges, as well as reasons thereof.
 Identify linkages and institutional arrangements between DST and other government departments.
 Formulate high level recommendations aimed at coordinating poverty alleviation programmes and enhancing their social impact.