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The Sundays River Valley Story
Sundays River Valley in South Africa has been involved in several of ICLD’s programmes, including a municipal partnership. Deon Pretorius is one of the participants but also an ICLD mentor. Here he gives us some background about the Sundays River Valley and how ICLD’s programmes help to make positive progresses in the municipality.
By the end of 2018 the Sundays River Valley was on the brink of major destruction and the potential collapse of the local citrus agricultural sector. Farm workers and communities were unhappy with the Citrus Farmers, the Municipality and the ruling ANC about a range of socio-economic and socio-political issues. I was asked to become involved to find solutions by the Citrus Producers. My assessment was that community leaders should be enabled with more capacity to make an effective contribution to local decision-making that has an effect on the lives of people who live in local communities and work on the citrus farms. Confrontational and adversarial political activism was not leading anywhere and may, indeed, become self-defeating.
The work started with engagements with particularly the local community leaders. The approach was explicitly developmental. The focus was on training community activist leaders to become agents of collaborative development. Intensive training over a period of two to three years took place. An initial task team of activist leaders morphed into an entity that was named the Sundays River Valley Collaborative (SRVC) which included leaders from all townships.
From training programme to municipal partnership
In this time the ICLD also started making an impact in the Sundays River Valley. This started in 2021 when a team of two politicians, an official and a representative from civil society from Sundays River Valley joined the one-year ICLD’s training programme “Leadership in Local Governance” together with me, their mentor. After the completion of the training programme the team decided to continue the work with ICLD by entering the programme for municipal partnership. Read more about this here.
The Sundays River Valley story is a typical facilitated-development story that is characterised by ups and downs and stops and starts. It is never easy because the resources and capacity for development is limited. Thus, the process of transformation and development takes a long time and requires a huge amount of patience. However, overall, the work done over three to four years with a primary focus on community leadership development is paying off in the sense that these community leaders started becoming effective developmental agents. So, they take initiative in areas like education and training, sport, art and culture, economic development, employment creation etc. to improve the quality of life of their communities.
Everyone’s interests to promote collaborative development
They realise now that waiting on government or some other external saviour is not going to solve their problems and that violence and destruction is ultimately self-defeating. Instead of being confrontational it is in everyone’s interests to promote collaborative development. Thus, civil society has become much more assertive, and a particularly positive aspect of the Sundays River Valley is that there are more and more instances of civil society and local government working together and there are also pockets of “non-partisan” developmental politics where leaders of opposing political parties are starting to work together for inclusive development.
The relationship with the ICLD have been a positive influence throughout this time and some of the progress is a result of exposure to the ICLD programmes. Some of the leaders were and are part of the ICLD programmes. Through the ICLD locals have also started to learn about a Swedish and Nordic way of doing things as an example of what is possible.
The municipal partnership
During 2022 the Sarah Baartman District Municipality and the Sundays River Valley Local Municipality jointly lodged an application for the ICLD Partnership Programme that would have a focus on Youth Inclusion. The application was successful and the team from South Africa were paired with a team from the Swedish municipality Falkenberg. The collaboration between the two teams started in 2023 as the Inception Year. A team from Falkenberg visited the Valley in March and in May a team from Sarah Baartman District Municipality and the Sundays River Valley Local Municipality visited Falkenberg. The indications are that this will be a fruitful and mutually beneficial partnerships!
By Deon Pretorius (ICLD Mentor)
