Technical Assistance to the Auditor General of South Africa

• Worked with SAFEGE, a company based in Belgium.

The project involved the Technical Assistance to the Auditor General of South Africa. Its purpose was to designed auditing tools / questionnaires for the Auditor General to be able for them to audit a number of key initiatives in the Education Sector of South Africa.

RRD, by order of ECO3 (later SAFEGE), has been active in Pretoria, South Africa to help the Auditor-General of South Africa (AGO) investigate a number initiatives in the South African educational field.

The overall objective of this project was to develop guidelines and procedures for a performance audit to be conducted at the National Department of Education and Provincial Departments of Education. The guidelines and procedures were based on international best practices, and take into account the South Africa 's relevant legislation, regulations and best practices in this.

The initiatives investigated by AGO concern the following:

1. Joint Initiative on Priority Skills Acquisition (Jipsa). Jipsa was an initiative that sets skills priorities in support of South Africa's economic growth objectives. It advised on aligning the training and skills-development efforts of the public and private sectors;
2. Further Education and Training (FET). FET encompasses grades 10 to 12 in schools, and FET colleges. Policies, interventions and funds have been dedicated to expanding access to and improving the quality of education and training in FET schools and colleges. In order to improve governance and administration, rehabilitate buildings and other infrastructure, and develop new modern curricula to produce graduates with the skills needed to contribute to accelerated economic growth.
3. No-fee schools.
4. Adult Basic Education and Training (ABET).
5. Integrated quality management system (IQMS) which relates to the development of a system to evaluating the educators' performance and improving the quality of education.
6. School feeding programmes.
7. Early childhood development (ECD). Learner access to Grade R (grade 3 in EU terms) is targeted with this programme.
8. Kha Ri Gude national literacy campaign project is an adult literacy campaign, that started in 2008.
9. 10th school day survey that relates to the learner unit record information and tracking system.