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There is no doubt of the commitment to provide Green Jobs in South Africa. As almost everyone working in the departments [of agriculture] knows, there can be some traps in this. The danger is that jobs are created that only last seven months, with unemployment following. The other problem is that green jobs can be created to provide infrastructure to create more sustainable land use. But, then after the programme has finished, the infrastructure will not actually be maintained and made use of by the community in which it is installed. Members of the community will see the installation of structures such as dams, fencing, contour bunds and gabions as a job providing exercise and, after the Green Job program has finished they will not feel any commitment to maintaining these structures. This has happened all too often in the past for it to be regarded as a surprising and unexpected development in the current situation.
What could work is for Green Jobs to be provided in training villagers. The people who had the jobs would be teaching villagers how to make improvements in the productivity of their agriculture, using low input cheap technologies. At present in South Africa we have a situation in which one agricultural extension officer can be working with up to five or more villages. The officer is supposed to be giving advice and helping people with projects, with food security and with every agricultural activity on their homestands, cropping fields and grazing lands. This is clearly impossible, they are massively overstretched. What could be done instead is this. The agricultural officer could go around each village and find five people in the village who are already engaged in successful agricultural work for their household food security, whether on their homestand, their cropping field or in the grazing land. These five people could be offered a 2 day a week job – leaving them time to continue with their own agricultural work. Their job would be training other villagers in techniques to increase sustainable productivity. We could call these people “barefoot extension officers”. They would spend a month in training, learning a set of skills and then six months instructing other villagers in these techniques. The departments would be responsible for providing the cheap materials necessary to make these strategies work – for example concrete and sand for mortar for making an in-ground holding pond for water runoff, chicken wire to make a cage to protect young chickens from hawks, fencing wire to fence a home stand from goats and chickens and so on. The system of payment could be one in which the permanent full time agricultural officer checks the improvements in people’s agricultural work that have been put in place following the advice of the “barefoot extension officer”, and pays the barefoot extension officer if their instruction has produced some real improvements in village agriculture.
The training would be aimed at creating a set of complementary skills for the five barefoot extension officers in each village – for example how to determine a contour and build a contour bund, how to create a gabion and spreader bank to reduce erosion, how to collect seeds and grow legume trees for fodder, mulch and nitrogen fixing, how to make a concrete pond and collect yard and road run off, how to plant and look after a fruit tree, how to grow a tree from a seed or cutting or graft stock, how to make a compost heap or a mudbrick compost toilet, how to install simple guttering using corrugated iron and fencing wire, how to create a tank using a frame and chicken wire and mortar, how to plant an intercrop with cereals to fix nitrogen and provide mulch, conservation farming with cereal crops, using hand weeding. The total skills set should be divided into five parts and each barefoot officer in a village trained in a different skill set.
The great advantage of this system is that every agricultural green improvement made to production would be put in place by villagers themselves who would only be helped with simple materials by the departments. There would be no danger of an absence of community ownership with a consequent lapsing of these strategies after the jobs finished. The barefoot extension officers would learn a skills set that they might be able to charge for after the project seven months had finished, and in any village there would be five people who would together be able to instruct in any necessary techniques for local sustainability and food security. Materials would be donated only to villagers who demonstrated they were using them. For example the barefoot officer would go around seeing which home stands needed fencing and which just needed a repair and which were fine. They would then offer villagers the option of being supplied with materials and instructed in fencing. They would then provide maybe a fifth of the materials necessary and check after a week to make sure that part of the fence had been installed before supplying any further materials. With fruit trees, they would supervise the digging of the hole, the access to water, the composting heap, the provision of mulch and so on and then supervise the planting of the tree, for which residents might be asked to provide a subsidized sum (say R6 to R12). Then, if all that went according to plan and some weeks later, the tree was being properly cared for, they could offer a second tree. All this would ensure ownership and enthusiasm.
This is the way in which the government’s commitment to provide people with paying jobs could be turned into real long standing improvements in food security and well being in the villages, rather than setting up a whole lot of fly by night make work projects that leave nothing to show a few years later.