The Jozi@Work programme is set to empower Joburg residences, particularly the unemployed and disenfranchised, by providing them with employment and business opportunities within the city council’s service delivery activities.
Through this initiative, an estimated 1 750 new and existing enterprises at community level will take over the responsibilities of service delivery across the city, city council manager Trevor Fowler said.
“Jozi@work will change the way the city does business in a fundamental way. It will create thousands of new neighbourhood co-operatives and micro-enterprises, hungry for entry-level workers,” he said.
“In the first year of the programme, it will support an estimated 12 500 permanent livelihoods, with triple that amount projected for the next phase as we ramp up the amount of City spending to be channelled through the programme,” Fowler said.
According to Fowler, these stakeholders would be involved in the city council’s service delivery activities including the separation and recycling at dump sites, providing food to its urban nutrition programmes, de-sludging chemical toilets, resurfacing and maintaining roads, and providing frontline support to the city’s water and power infrastructure.
“Our residents will no longer only be customers and recipients of city services, they will also be suppliers of these services.”
In this way, he said, service delivery would be much more localised resulting in higher degrees of efficiency, shorter turnaround times and improved levels of accountability.
The city council had developed a new supply chain process in consultation with the National Treasury, through which it would source community-based enterprises and co-operatives using a network of regional bidders’ briefings – also known as regional Jozi@work forums.
“Our focus is on small, very small and micro-concerns – in many instances a small group of friends or neighbours – who can pitch for City business in terms of a simplified and streamlined process,” Fowler said.
“We want to spread the net of participating enterprises as widely as possible – reaching the large number of our residents who are looking for opportunities to earn an income.”
The city council is expected to hold public information meetings during August.
Details of the meetings have yet to be announced but could be accessed on the city council’s website www.joburg.org.za once they became available.
