In his 2010 State of the Nation Address, the President reiterated the importance of the national infrastructure investment programme:

“Underpinning our strategy for ecomomic recovery and growth, is our capital investment programme.  Over the next three years government will spend R846 billion on public infrastructure”.

A large portion of this spend will be in the provincial and local spheres on social infrastructure mainly in education and health – sectors facing a number of delivery challenges.

The Business Trust Support Programme for Accelerated Infrastructure Development has undertaken to produce Infrastructure Procurement & Contracting Strategy for Limpopo’s Education Department.  This has to date produced a strategy for implementation and has proved its potential value in adopting a sector specific approach.

The central objective of developing a sector procurement strategy is to guide the allocation of resources in a more rational fashion and in this instance direct the most appropriate and best value procurement approach.

While reasonably good data exists in respect of current needs / backlogs, no adequate framework or methodology exists to help guide the appropriate location of infrastructure resources or assist in determining possible procurement and contracting options that will maximise value-for-money, deal with capacity constraints and ensure long-term sustainability.

A sector procurement and contracting strategy must answer the following:

•    What type and scale of infrastructure and where should it be located?

•    What are the most important primary and secondary objectives that the infrastructure procurement must meet?

•    How will the infrastructure be delivered and by whom?

•    What is the most appropriate contract type given the infrastructure delivery option?

The aim of the Infrastructure Sector Procurement Dialogue is to review the approach being developed for a sector specific infrastructure procurement and contracting strategy and to consider the implication and impact of this approach in the current pilot project (Limpopo Education) as well as social infrastructure sector more broadly.

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