Stakeholders from wards 1, 2 and 4 gathered at Siyathemba community hall on Monday, 5 th September 2016 to be part of the launching of the ward war rooms for their respective wards. This was an attempt by the Department of Cooperative Governance & Traditional Affairs as represented by the Community Development Workers of the wards concerned to accelerate the rolling out of this program in the municipality.
According to the guidelines of the Operation Vuka Sisebente framework the chairpersons of the war rooms are the ward councilors of the wards and the secretaries are the respective CDW, they are those deputized by community members from different structures. Based on this, the chairperson of war rooms for ward 1, 2 and 4 are Cllr. Siphiwe Nhlapo, Cllr. Khethiwe Nkosi and Cllr. Mafunda Makhubu, respectively.
The main mission of the system is to provide comprehensive, integrated and transversal services to communities through effective and efficient partnerships. The OVS model encourages the coordination of comprehensive services of different service providers such as government departments; state owned enterprises as well as civil society as it views the delivery of anti-poverty programs as a collective responsibility.
The strategy is to integrate services so that they collectively enable the communities to deal effectively with eradicating poverty and other challenges. This is to be achieved through five important areas such as community partnerships, behavior change, integration of government services, economic activities and environmental care.
