Social Audits training in Phola
Community alerts, Lorraine Kakaza, Carolina, Mpumalanga, 31/95/2018
We had a training for social audits at Phola ( community hall)Mpumalanga province under Emalahleni manucipality
Meeting started on the 29 until 31 May 2018
It was hard due to protest but it was successful
Aim of a social audit is to give a feedback on how resources are utilise , money spend and give report to the crowd it can be communities to gorvernment,companies and to hold them accountable.
Social audit is a community-led process that facilitates public participation in the monitoring of gorvernment service delivery and expenditure.
*it’s conducted by communities to collect / compare relevant documents to reality.
The element of social audit involves many elements it can be a door to door , campaigns etc
– In most cases when the mine wants to operates it has to make commitments of which is SLP to the Department of minerals and it’s for five years they must state what is the quantity and they not meet their promises and they don’t come to the community instead they go to DMR and negotiate so communities have a right to act or
-SLP is a document that the mine companies on how are they going to work bring back to the community.Slp is All about legal commitment by the mine for local development.
Arguments is if they don’t meet their commitment mining licence needs to be suspended untill the community find resolutions
What if DMR (department of minerals and resources) doesn’t monitor communities have a right to monitor and dmr has to take the mining licence.
We had Lucy from Australia whose a part she’s saying they need stories around communities so that they can come up with solution’s what’s important is to hold companies accountable.
*In the room there is a lady Thandi from Makause section at Phola her concern was the mine called Glencore moved them and never compensated and there were people doing door to door collecting R50.00 saying they are from Glencore they are in the process to compensate then they put them on the data base so they really need social audit they need to realise their right to know
Principles of Social audit
1.Community led
2.Help to realise constitutional rights and build community
3.It Gather evidence and legitimise community experience
4.It examine and verify gorvernment documents
5.Hold gorvernment accountable through public hearing and follow up
6.Nonpartisan (social audit may be political but are not based on party politics)
Lesson’s i learnt from this training/ workshop
-There is a need to be strategic and have intellectual capacity it is going to take time but at the end of the day will achieve, let’s learn all the process and not be too radically
So when conducting a social audit you need to follow 10 steps
1.Hilding a mass meeting and establishment
2.Preparing and organising the participant group
3.Training the participants group
4.Developing and testing the social questioners
5.Gathering evidence the community(door to door)
6.Capturing community experience and Testimony for the public hearing
7.Agreeing on the main findings and organising the evidence
8.Preparing for the public hearing
9.Holdingthe public hearing(community will do the presentation )
10.Reflecting and following up( it’s difficult to do follow up but community need to do that have their own report , get skills , make enough noise , make sure that voices are vocal / collaborate with partners , gain a buy in , to speak together, have unity)
*so today on the 31 May 2018 ‘ll be doing a baseline survey (it mean it’s a history of the beginning of establishment of the environment it can be health or anything.
* ‘ll do that a test we need to get the social labour plan before that there will be a training questions will be developed
The training was very successful the meeting was supported by Actionaid
Thank you
