Page 684 - Provincial Treasury Estimates.pdf

Department: Sport, Recreation, Arts and Culture

In Infrastructure development, the department can report that there has been progress made on various

library projects as it relates to construction of new libraries, refurbishment of the existing facilities
renovating and modernizing local libraries. The department obtained its target of 2 libraries to be
maintained, with upgrading and additions and also completed the newly built Mango modular library before

expectations.

In increasing participation in sport and recreation, the department managed to host very successful events
as well as support to Provincial Teams for National participation, with 500 leaners supported to participate

in school sport programs at national level. Eastern Cape Indigenous Games team with 179 disciplines
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participated in the national IG Festival and obtained 3 position, bringing back home a bronze medal. The
department further serviced the existing twinning agreement between the province and the State of Lower

Saxony in Germany by implementing the youth exchange programme, triathlon exchange programme and
youth reverse volunteers. The department has already achieved its target of 250 athletes that were

supported by sport academies (sector indicator) with still a few months left to year end. There were 11
programmes implemented in sport development from its target of 15 programmes, with the remainder
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implemented in the 4 quarter.

2.2 Key challenges

The economic situation of the country necessitated the rationalisation of our operations and reengineering
our systems, process and procedures to deliver on our mandate. Challenges that are faced by the
department include the following which are being addressed through the implementation of the service

delivery model:
ƒ ƒ Planning in the department and across the board in the province continues to be a challenge that
negatively impacts on service delivery;

ƒ Loss of competent and skilled staff through promotions to other departments. ;
ƒ The delivery of infrastructure projects due to limited project management skills. This affects the

department particularly in so far as the contents of the contractual agreements, the managing of those
contract agreements, the management of the S42 certificates and close out of these projects where
they have to be managed or handed over to the recipients beyond the handover ceremony;

ƒ Inadequacy on the budget particularly on libraries and archives;
ƒ The budget for sporting facilities and the function being that of municipalities creates a disjuncture

and undue expectation from the department by the public;
ƒ The adequacy of our programmes in supporting our artist to explore new to markets for their products:

and
ƒ As part of the recommendations, the department will endeavour to improve its planning processes as
well as ensure that all the challenges identified above have activities geared at intervening on these

areas.

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