DDF spreads its wings to urban areas
THE District Development Fund is working hard to ensure that President Mnangagwa’s “Zimbabwe is Open for Business” policy benefits everyone through rural and urban infrastructural development.
Speaking at a National Integrated Results-Based Management Strategic Planning Workshop held in Darwendale last week, the Secretary in the Office of the President and Cabinet in charge of DDF and related infrastructure, Mr James Jonga, said the new dispensation would not prosper without proper infrastructure.
This, he said, was why DDF had added urban infrastructure development to its initial responsibility of developing rural community infrastructural.
“This is why you have found DDF going beyond the issues of rural development and even addressing issues of urban infrastructural development,” said Mr Jonga.
“If you are now finding it easy to access Mukwati Building by road, Kaguvi Building by road, it is not because of the (Harare) City Council (but) it is because of DDF efforts.”
Despite limited resources, Mr Jonga said DDF had also spread its wings to include fighting the cholera outbreaks that affected some urban centres across Zimbabwe last year.
The DDF provided safe and clean water in rural areas as well as in some Government buildings in Harare’s Central Business District such as Mukwati and Kaguvi.
“We take pride in ensuring that there is no cholera in the rural areas,” said Mr Jonga. “We are the ones who championed the provision of safe drinking water to the marginalised areas of our country.
“We have also tried to do the same in urban areas after discovering that most of our staff were being affected by the cholera outbreak we went out of our way and provided safe water to the Government complexes, Parirenyatwa Group of Hospitals and the Harare Central Hospital.”
Mr Jonga encouraged the DDF directorate to unify their workforce and ensure that all projects were fully implemented in its various departments.
He said public works should continue improving rural people’s livelihoods.
“These are the ones which look after the disadvantaged in the rural areas some of whom may be on the verge of facing a severe drought and might have to find other means of survival,” he said.
The workshop that was attended by top officials from the DDF and the Public Works Department was meant to reposition the departments as a critical player in the discharge of national public works duties such as roads and water among others.
It was also seeking to reinvigorate the importance of the public works programme to look after the disadvantaged while accelerating infrastructure development in the rural areas and addressing projects of a “hotspot nature” within the resuscitated National Task Force where DDF occupies the deputy chair position.