Basic Education Director-General, Mr Mathanzima Mweli, has resumed with the support and monitoring of the Sanitation Appropriate for Education (SAFE) construction sites as part of the Batch 5 Projects at schools across provinces.

Mr Mweli is currently monitoring sanitation projects in the Eastern Cape Province to ensure that deadlines are met and Implementing Agents complete projects timeously. The focus this week has been on projects allocated to the Development Bank of South Africa (DBSA) Implementing Agent.

The DG is accompanied by officials from National, Provincial and District level, the Project Support Unit (PSU) and the DBSA. The summary of the observations is that too many projects present concerns ranging from the quality of work to the determination of practical completion. These concerns will be discussed with DBSA officials during their Monday morning meeting, and with Contractors, Professional Service Providers (PSPs) in a meeting scheduled for Monday evening, as well as the infrastructure and finance line function meeting on Wednesday.

On the first day, 26 schools were covered in the Alfred Nzo East District; on the second day, 17 schools were visited in the Alfred Nzo West and OR Tambo Coastal Districts; and on the third and last day, the team experienced challenges of visiting projects which were vastly distributed across districts and managed to reach only 8 schools in the OR Tambo Coastal and Alfred Nzo West Districts. This then brings to an end the programme of supporting and monitoring the SAFE programme construction sites for the 2023 academic year, given the fact that the DG will now move to supporting and monitoring Marking Centres for the 2023 NSC examination, the exercise which he has already started last week when he returned from the UNESCO 42nd General Conference by visiting staggered Marking Centres in the Gauteng and Mpumalanga Provinces respectively. The support and monitoring of the SAFE programme will resume in January 2024, as soon as the construction sites are available and this will continue up to the end of the financial year.