A survivor in Drakenstein could know that help existed somewhere and still not know where the referral pathway started. The people most likely to notice early signs, ECD teachers who see children every day, had no training in what to do about it. Men were largely absent from the conversation. And a mother seeking counselling had nowhere to put her children while she did it.
A survivor who reports and receives no counselling is a survivor left to carry it alone. In Msukaligwa Municipality, the Department of Social Development was reaching three victims/survivors a month through counselling. The services existed. The Victim Empowerment Programme facilities and shelters were there. What was missing was the flow of people into them, which depends entirely on whether anyone in the community knows the services exist and how to reach them.
Gert Sibande TVET College runs across five campuses in communities that do not share the same problem. What stops a student reporting in Evander is not what drives new HIV infections in Perdekop. A single college-wide GBVF programme would have been designed for none of them. The college let each campus name its own problem instead.
A college with almost no GBVF reports does not have almost no GBVF. It has students who have worked out that reporting costs more than staying silent. Across Majuba’s five campuses, two sat at four or five reported cases a year. Stigma, fear of being identified, and no visible route from a disclosure to actual support kept the numbers artificially low and the problem invisible.
Economic dependence is one of the reasons a woman stays. Pillar 5 of the NSP-GBVF names this directly, but a ring-fenced procurement target on paper does not put money in anyone’s hands. In Capricorn, women-owned businesses held 31% of the municipal supply chain. The businesses existed. The route from a street corner in Polokwane to an official purchase order did not.
A domestic violence matter that drags past three months stops being a legal process and becomes a second ordeal. At Ga-Kgapane, 56 cases sat in backlog, and the two things holding them there were both outside the court’s direct control: incomplete returns of service from SAPS, and applicants who could not give an accurate address for the respondent. A file cannot move if nobody can be found to serve.
A backlog is not an administrative figure. For a woman waiting on a maintenance order, it is months without the money that feeds her children. For a survivor waiting on a sexual offence matter, it is months of living alongside an unresolved case. Lephalale carried backlogs across four case types at once, and the turnaround times on the two most urgent categories sat at a month.
More than 1,000 domestic violence matters sat in the pipeline at Mahwelereng, and a case took five months to finalise. Five months is a long time to hold your life still. It is also long enough for a survivor to lose the will to see the matter through, which is how cases quietly disappear without anyone recording a decision to abandon them.
The Thohoyandou Magistrate’s Court serves communities across deep rural Vhembe. For a survivor who has applied for a protection order, distance and the cost of data decide whether she can follow her matter through to the end. Every case that carries over to the next term is a person still waiting. New domestic matters arrive faster than most courts can close old ones.
Governments are rarely short of plans. What they lack is a way to move from the plan to the street inside a timeframe the public can feel. The UAE Prime Minister’s Office set out to close that gap through its Government Accelerators, running 100-Day Challenges with support from the Rapid Results Institute. Two of the results speak directly to service delivery, and both turned on the same idea: hand a frontline team a hard goal and the authority to reach it, then get out of its way.
Cuyahoga County was producing homelessness at a predictable rate and then treating it as a surprise. Young people aged out of foster care each year and a substantial share of them landed in shelters or on the street within a few years. The county knew this was happening. What it did not have was a way to see who those young people were, one by one, in time to do anything about it.
Kenya passed a water law in 2002 requiring the creation of independent water boards, semi-autonomous bodies to manage water delivery. The ministry did not know how to implement it. The budget year made that worse. Between plan-writing from June, a budget arriving in September, December closed, revisions in January and a midterm review in February, a Kenyan ministry had roughly a hundred working days in any year to actually implement anything.
In 2007, eighteen months after the peace accord between North and South Sudan, thirteen post-conflict communities each ran a 100-day Rapid Results Initiative under Sudan’s Community Development Fund. Each team chose its own results goal, linked to a construction effort. Most exceeded it.
Food fortification is cheap and the health case is settled. Getting it to happen is the hard part. In Kenya, years of meetings and workshops on fortification had produced action plans and calls for more meetings, and little else. Stakeholders were drifting away. Fortifying salt with iodine in the 1990s had taken more than two years, so the idea that anything could move faster was not widely believed.
Rural development in Ghana ran through large contractors and district assemblies, and it was slow and expensive. In one district, a three-unit classroom block stood unfinished four years after construction began. A few feet away, in 2006, a Rapid Results team would build an identical block in 95 days. The prevailing belief, the hardest thing the initiative had to overcome, was that communities did not have the capacity to do this themselves. As Assin South’s District Chief Executive admitted, when he first heard 100 days it sounded funny and he thought it could not work.
The scale of HIV/AIDS tends to swallow the response. Time and energy go into strategy, policy and curriculum while little changes in schools. Eritrea’s national adult HIV prevalence sat at an estimated 2.4% in 2004, low by regional standards, and the government’s aim was to keep it there or push it down rather than wait for it to climb.
Norman Piccioni’s agricultural technology project had run for fourteen years, funded by the World Bank, DFID and the Swiss Development Agency, and was stuck in the usual way: institutions that would not integrate their work, and a national habit of funding agricultural research rather than getting existing technology into farmers’ hands. When the Rapid Results approach was pitched, the counterparts were openly sceptical, one saying they had already done every rapid result imaginable.
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Jot down thoughts on these questions – to the extent they are relevant to your experience at the session:
They did some work before you received the Challenge Note. This included:
Mentors will participate in all or part of the Lift-Off Workshop, mostly at the start to provide context and answer questions, and at the end to give you and your teammates feedback about the goal and plan you develop.
During the 100 days following the Lift-Off Workshop, here’s what the Mentors will do: