Abstract:
Metropolitan municipalities in Gauteng Province of South Africa are responsible for
more than nine million inhabitants. This implies that they are the largest providers of
municipal services to the inhabitants of the Gauteng Province. The research focused
on only the services identified as basic to society. This was done to establish the
extent to which the three metropolitan municipalities viz. Tshwane, Ekurhuleni and
Johannesburg meet the Millennium Development Goals. The research focused on
the delivery of services to informal settlements to determine how the respective
municipalities identified the need for services and how they provided the services
to a rather unknown number of inhabitants in the selected settlements. A sample
was used in each municipality to guide the researcher in determining the impact of
the services in relation to the Millenium Development Goals. The article discusses
the essence and importance of programme performance information as reform
mechanism in metropolitan municipalities in the South African context, Millennium
Development Goals [MDGs] and the provision of basic services by the South African
government since 2003 – 2013.
The approach adopted in this article, is to use Impact Evaluation (IE) – which is a
process used to conduct evaluations and provide publication of results in Gauteng’s
metropolitan municipalities (Ekurhuleni, Johannesburg and Tshwane). For a scientific
and balanced output – various sources of information will be consulted, results analysed
and compared to calibrate a view and formulate an opinion on how metropolitan
municipalities in Gauteng are performing in terms of the provision of basic services.
