Why monitoring the budget allocated for implementing the Children’s Act is a useful tool to track progress in implementation
Section 7(2) of the Bill of Rights in the South African Constitution places an obligation on the State to give effect to all the rights in the Bill of Rights. This includes children’s rights to family care or alternative care, social services, and protection from abuse and neglect. To meet its obligation the State must ensure that the required conditions and services to fulfil these rights are available. The new Children’s Act [No 38 of 2005] as amended by the Children’s Amendment Act [No 41 of 2007] now clearly sets out what services the State must provide to give effect to the rights listed above. These include:
- partial care facilities (crèches)
- early childhood development (ECD) programmes
- prevention and early intervention services
- drop-in centres
- protection services (including a support scheme for child-headed households)
- foster care and cluster foster care
- adoption
- child and youth care centres (children’s homes, places of safety, schools of industry, reform schools, secure care facilities, and shelters for street children)
To make these services available for the many vulnerable children who need them, the State needs to allocate adequate budget to each service area. The Children’s Act says that the provincial Members of the Executive Council (MECs) for Social Development are responsible for providing and funding all these services with the budgets allocated to them by the provincial legislatures.
In 2006, a government-commissioned costing of the Children’s Bill was published, which provided estimates of the real cost of implementing the Children’s Act. This costing provides a yardstick against which the government’s budgets can be measured.
Monitoring the government's budget allocations and expenditure for these services, and comparing them to the estimates in the Costing Report is therefore a good way of measuring a province’s progress in giving effect to the Children’s Act, and ultimately in giving effect to the rights of children.
The papers on this webpage examines what the budget estimates for the provincial Departments of Social Development, as recorded under the relevant votes, tell us about the provincial governments’ intentions in respect of implementing the Children’s Act.
- Research on 2010/2011 Budget
- Research on 2009/10 Budget
- Research on 2008/09 Budget
- Research on the 2007/08 Budget