Introduction

The City of Cape is the southern most part of the African continent in the Republic of South Africa. It is a city of 3 million people. It has a well developed infrastructure and is regarded on the continent is a rich city. There are however huge disparities between those who have and those that lack. Whilst there is a large section of the city that is wealthy and well-developed, there are also many people housed in ‘tin’ houses in the slums in Khayelitsha, Gugulethu, Nyanga, and other low-income areas.

Approximately 32% of the Cape population lives below the poverty datum line which as at 1999 was R14500 per year. These poor areas comprise 60% of the Cape population. The city’s population is growing at the rate of 2.5% per year. Of this growth, up to 50 000 people come in as migrants annually. The unemployment rate is 26%. This contrasts sharply with the city’s status as the tourist capital of the country.

The city is situated by the sea. Its climate is therefore largely influenced by the ocean and is quite different from the more inland parts of the country. Whilst the rest of the country receives their rains in summer from November to March, Cape Town receives the bulk of its rain in winter, between April and August. Urban agriculture is there largely practiced during winter except where irrigation facilities are available.

Re-establishment of Contacts: May 2007

The MPAP officer undertook several visits to Cape Town from April. The purpose of these visits was to re-affirm MDP-RUAF’s commitment to establishing the Cape Town Pilot project. They were also meant to familiarize the new MPAP Officer with the project. During the visits meetings were held with some of the identified stakeholders in Urban Agriculture in Cape Town as well as the Cape Town City Council officials who are coordinating the project.

Field visits were also conducted to both established and planned urban agriculture projects in the low-income areas of Nyanga and Khayelitsha. Abalimi Bezekhaya, a local NGO working to establish and run community gardens in Cape Town facilitated the field visits. The visits helped in appreciating the types and scales of interventions already taking place in Cape Town.

Training of Trainers: June 2007

The TOT for Cape Town was conducted from 25 to 29 June 2007.  The ToT was conducted for the key drivers of the Cape Town Project. Stakeholders from government departments, council departments, NGOs, and other civic groups attended the ToT. Percy from MDP-RUAF and Henk de Zeeuw from ETC-RUAF head office delivered the modules. Thembie Chiromo from SNV Zimbabwe, who is one of the initial trainers in the Eastern and Southern Africa region trained in 2005 in Harare, assisted them. Also in attendance were two colleagues from Ndola in Zambia who attended as observers. They had earlier on been identified as potential key drivers in the Ndola pilot project.

It was observed earlier on in the training that insufficient groundwork had been done in raising the team’s awareness on the CFF Project. The time lapse between the initial contacts had also meant that some of the people who knew about the project had either left their organizations, or had been reassigned to other portfolios. Henk and Percy then modified the ToT to also be an awareness raising, and team building exercise. Whilst the team was not so happy with the new approach initially since they had come prepared to be trained, they later realized the importance of understanding the project and their roles in it. At the end, the people were clearer of their roles and were raring to go. The team from council also looked more fired up.

The training activity had the important role of bonding the team. A new team was created during the TOT. The other issue was the clarity on the MPAP process created as a result of the participation in the TOT.

Formation of core team

The coordination structure in Cape Town operates at two levels. This was agreed to as a deliberate move to address the peculiar project needs of Cape Town. The stakeholders appeared to be operating at two different levels where there was an active group at the operational level and a not-so-active yet important group at management level. At the ToT, the identified key stakeholders of the Cape Town Project were constituted into a core team of the project. These are the drivers of the project on a day-to-day basis. They plan, manage, and monitor the multi-stakeholder action planning (MAP) process. The group comprises of representatives of key council departments, government departments, NGOs, and CBOs. Above this core team is another decision making body made up of people and institutions that have the authority to make decisions on higher order issues such as resources for the project. This group includes Stanley Visser, Rob Small, and other heads to which core team members report.

Whilst the lower group (Core Team) is now firmly in place since they were the participants at the ToT, the other group (Management Team) is not yet as well established.

MOU Approved

The council approved the memorandum of understanding between MDP-RUAF and the City of Cape Town. The Executive Director for Development Facilitation was mandated by the council to sign the MOU on council behalf whilst the MDP Director will sign on behalf of MDP-RUAF. This MOU will give different council departments the mandate to work on the project and dedicate their time and other resources to the same.

MPAP I and Planning Workshop

This was conducted from 5 to 9 November 2007. This was timed to come after the appointment of the Local Coordinator who we wanted to benefit from the activity as well as assist in it. Indeed he assisted in preparing for the event. This was also a good platform for him to meet the stakeholders and to be introduced to them. Key stakeholders such as the City of Cape Town, Abalimi, MJC, and different government departments were represented at the workshop.

The workshop was referred to as a training and planning workshop. It sought to achieve two main objectives; The first objective was to develop the project core team members’ capacity to conduct the Situation Analysis of urban agriculture in Phillipi; The second was to further develop the core group driving the MAP process in Cape Town by bringing them together and help in team building.

Modules relevant to Situation Analysis were delivered to the group by Henk and Percy assisted by local team members and the Coordinator. In order to further familiarize the stakeholders with the task at hand, one of the days comprised field activities whereby participants went out to conduct some farming systems analysis.

Situation Analysis

Preparations for the situation analysis are at an advanced stage. Teams to conduct the various components of the SA have been created and funds made available. It is expected that the fieldwork will be completed by early February 2008 and the report will be available by end of February.

Impact

There is increasing farmer empowerment. The MDP-RUAF trainings have brought to the same table farmers and the authorities. For the first time, they realise that they can relate to authorities as partners. They are also realising that there are so many services available to them that they did not know of and therefore were not benefiting from. Cape Town has several farmer support schemes that farmers were not benefiting from.

Probably the biggest impact has been on participatory city governance. There is a significantly higher level of participation by different stakeholders to the way UA is managed. When we moved into Cape Town, efforts at drafting the UA Policy were already under way. The level of engagement was however not as widespread as it began. In the first training (ToT), some of the participants who were stakeholders in UA did not know about the policy. The MPAP process however provided an opportunity for the partners to reach out to each other more widely; the city officials conceded that they had a policy and resources but was failing to get those inputs to the intended beneficiaries. Now different input providers are talking to each other and realising areas of convergence and where there are gaps. The Muslim Judiciary Council in Phillipi has equipment for training and tillage that was largely idle. Now there are concrete plans to train farmers, utilise the plots more, and ultimately lead to higher productivity. Another NGO supporting and working with farmers is expanding its activities and want to assist farmers access the resources that they now know are available with different municipal and government departments.