Pretoria - To help accelerate household targeting and indigent support initiatives, government has developed and implemented the Credible Indigent Policy Assessment Framework.
The framework is being used by the Department of Provincial and Local Government to assess the credibility of municipal indigent policies and registers.
"By the end of this month, we will have completed the Indigent Policy and Register Assessment workshops in all 39 targeted municipalities," said Minister of Health Barbara Hogan, during a Social Cluster briefing on Monday.
The policy is based on using scientific tools to determine exactly who falls within the category of indigent.
Minister Hogan said poverty remained one of the key challenges facing South Africa. "It undermines our democracy. Therefore government has put in place a number of interventions geared at minimising its impact on people."
By the end of 2008, government had formulated a draft Anti-Poverty Strategy and a national plan to implement this strategy as part of fast tracking efforts to lift more people out of poverty.
A draft poverty matrix has been drafted through the identification of key projects in the social and economic clusters. This matrix will be completed once the development of the national database of households living in poverty has been completed.
