The Expanded Public Works Programme( EPWP) is a government strategic intervention intended to reduce poverty and give income support through the creation of work openings for the poor and jobless South Africans.
In South Africa, black Africans, women, youth and the unskilled are the most affected by the high severance rate faced by the country.
Women are also the most vulnerable to the forces of the labour request, especially women of colour who substantially hold low- professed jobs.
This is verified by the Quarterly Labour Force Survey Quarter 1 2022, released by StatsSA, which set up that the severance rate for ladies was34.0 against31.4 of males.
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The EPWP through its structure, Social, Environment & Culture, as well asNon-State sectors play a significant part in perfecting livelihoods among communities through the provision of work, training openings, income in exchange for work and means and services delivered to poor and jobless South Africans.
“ The EPWP is thus committed to its accreditation of furnishing work openings to the most vulnerable and strictly engaging and intermediating in strategies aimed at drawing a significant number of people into productive work and strengthening women participation in the perpetration of EPWP systems in order to promote social protection and ameliorate livelihoods, ” says Acting Deputy Director- General of the EPWP, Carmen- Joy Abrahams.
In the current fiscal time2021/22 for the period 1 April – 30 June 2021, EPWP enforcing bodies, i.e. government and its social mates have enforced 4 674 systems across all the nine businesses creating 472 646 work openings. Of the work openings created by the programme, 73 were created for women.
This achievement is a donation towards the 5 million work openings to be created though the EPWP by 2024.
The participation target for women in the EPWP as one of the vulnerable groups has increased from 55 in the former phase( EPWP Phase 3) to 60 in the current phase( EPWP Phase 4) of perpetration of the Programme.
This increase in the target is significant in order to address some of the profitable inequalities that exists between men and women.
Actors ’ witnesses
A party in the EPWP, Zanele Cosa, confided government for utilising the EPWP to give profitable openings to poor and jobless women in her community of Emalahleni, in Mpumalanga.
Cosa is one of the women presently being trained by the Mpumalanga Regional Office of the Department of Public Works and structure( DPWI) and Emalahleni Local Municipality in road construction work.
She encouraged women in the EPWP to use the Programme to acquire chops they can use to gain employment or set up small businesses after exiting the Programme.
For Thembisile Msomi, being part of the EPWP’s Vuk ’ uphile Learnership Programme has changed her life for better.
“ It’s awful to see government furnishing women with chops to work in the construction sector, ” she said.
Msomi is one of the learner contractors who lately entered their statement of results after having shared in the Vuk ’ uphile Learnership Programme under the Dr Nkosazana Dlamini- Zuma( NDZ) Original megacity in KwaZulu- Natal.
She encouraged women in the EPWP to use the Programme as a platform to learn and to economically empower themselves. –SAnews.gov.za