Speech in the National Assembly on Budget Vote 20: Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities by Ms Thandi Nontenja, MP and Chief Whip in the National Assembly

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Honourable Speaker,
The United Democratic Movement (UDM) welcomes the report on budget vote 20, 2024/25 Financial Year. The Department is plagued with an array of challenges such as high levels of unemployment for youth and people with disability, GBV against women and children, gender inequality, elderly abuse and kidnaps and murder of children.

The Department serves as an agency where operational budget is mostly allocated to NYDA and CGE. For instance, on the 2023 budget allocation, transfer payments amounted to R827.4 million were made to CGE and NYDA, leaving the Department with an operating budget R209 million. In essence, these two entities do most of the work, which leads to a question of what exactly is the department paying staff members for, if there are no significant programmes done by the department.

This therefore calls for a crucial need to conduct an impact assessment on the work of the Department, to establish whether this budget has satisfactory results on the Department’s mission. Also, the UDM is asking whether there is any monitoring and evaluation taking place in the Department.

The UDM is also concerned that all 4 programmes of the Department reflect underspending, which makes the us wonder if the R8.2 million budget cut is caused by the under expenditure. This is disappointing because such funds could have been utilised on empowerment programmes, as women, youth and people with disabilities continue to be subjected to socio-economic ills.

Furthermore, the UDM is concerned that the administration receives 55% of the operational budget, 63% is allocated to compensation of employees and 23.4% is allocated to goods and services which is topped by consultants who take the biggest chunk. And, the question that arises is how much is allocated to service the three groups that should benefit from the budget.