Cape Town - The Department of Social Development has withdrawn funding from 192 NGOs in the province due to non-compliance.
This was revealed by the department on Tuesday during a briefing to the Standing Committee on Social Development on the monitoring, evaluation, and budget allocation for NGOs and service centres in the province.
The department said it had budgeted R1 billion in funding to non-profit organisations this financial year, R4 million less compared to the last financial year.
The department attributed this reduction in the budget to the shift of the funding of Early Childhood Development Centres to the Western Cape Education Department and the reduction in budget implementations this financial year.
This financial year, the department said it was funding 1 142 NGOs.
ANC provincial spokesperson on Social Development, Gladys Bakubaku-Vos said there were many NGOs working in the poor communities that were not receiving funding. She asked the department about its interventions in ensuring NPOs were compliant and received funding.
Bakubaku-Vos said she was also concerned about the high number of non-compliant NPOs. She said the department must place more effort into capacity-building programmes to support the struggling NPOs.
“We also want to see the department go out of its way to reach out to NPOs in poor working-class communities that are doing the work with limited resources due to compliance issues blocking them from accessing funding from the department,” she said.
Department spokesperson Esther Lewis said if any non-compliance was identified, the line programmes would develop a Service Improvement Delivery Plan for NPOs in order for them to comply within a 3-6 month period.
She said follow-ups were done to ensure service delivery improvement plans were implemented in order to improve the quality of service delivery by NPOs, and if needed, further capacity-building and support were provided by the department’s Institutional Capacity Building Unit on issues of financial management, good governance and sustainability.