Ireen Choga

The South African public sector is faced with many challenges and one of the major challenges is service delivery. This is linked with skills shortage resulting in public service having too many people to train in a short period of time. Training these many employees face-to-face has its challenges, as employees have to be away from their day-to-day duties to attend training and this not only has an impact on productivity, but also maximizes costs. To deal with and to minimize these challenges, the South African government has chosen to introduce e-Learning in public sector. This is aimed at ensuring that larger numbers of government officials are trained at minimum costs and ensuring that training reaches people with different responsibilities such as top management and people with families who cannot afford to be away from home or office for training for long periods of time. This study examined the advantages and disadvantages of the introduction of e-Learning in the public sector, the importance of strategic planning for e-Learning, the challenges faced by the public sector when it comes to training, how other organizations internationally have conceptualized e-Learning and what the public sector is hoping to achieve by introducing e-Learning. The gaps in the conceptualization of e-Learning in the South African public sector were identified and possible solutions including a paradigm shift from a reductionist way of thinking to a systems way of thinking and doing things was recommended.

Keywords: e-Learning, public sector, benchmarking, conceptualization.
JEL Classification: H83, A2, G21

The main purpose of this paper is to document some challenges faced by Independent Development Trust (IDT) in infrastructure delivery of the provincial government of KwaZulu-Natal. Infrastructure delivery has a significant effect on the local budgets or budgets of projects in the province. The main focus of the study was the root causes of delays, budgetary overruns and the resultant effect on service delivery back-logs and socio-economic impact caused by such delays. The study setting comprised of professional stakeholders in the built environment and these include specialists and professionals in the engineering, construction management, civil and general building fields. The objectives of this study were achieved by means of a self-administered questionnaire that was distributed to a group of participants, composed of project managers, quantity surveyors, engineers, architects and project managers working with IDT. The nature of the research was quantitative and data analysis used descriptive and a bit of inferential statistics to arrive at some generalizations and conclusions. The study was able to affirm that there are major inefficiencies in the current infrastructure delivery model of the South African government. Major causes identified include factors such as delays in payments, poor planning, subsiding levels of professional ethics and standards exercised by professionals in the built environment, and so forth. The study also made some recommendations from the research findings. Clearly the infrastructure delivery model requires a new trajectory in tackling the under-development and triple challenges of poverty, unemployment and slow economic growth.

The paper presents factors why people are reluctant to bank money in rural Southern African countries. Six countries namely Botswana, Namibia, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe were used in the study. A focus group of 10 people from each of the stated Southern African countries was composed and used to obtain perceptions, views, reactions, attitudes, experiences among others on why people are reluctant to bank their money. People are unwilling to bank their money in rural Southern Africa and the reasons behind this seem to be many. If no correctional measures are put in place, rural Southern Africa will continue to be unbanked for the next five decades.

This study determines the causal relationship that exists between government revenue and government expenditure in South Africa. The study employed annual time series data from the year 1980 to 2015 taken from the South African Reserve Bank. The Johansen multivariate method was employed to test for co-integration and for causality the Vector Error Correction/Granger causality test was employed. The empirical results suggest that there is a long-run relation-ship between government revenue and government expenditure. The causality result suggests that there is no causality between government revenue and government expenditure in South Africa. Thus, policy makers in the short run should determine government revenue and government expenditure of South Africa independently when reducing the budget deficit.

Productive inefficiency and lagging technology progress are major reasons behind the Southern Africa Development Community’s (SADC) continued exportation of unprocessed minerals to the world markets. The study seeks to uncover the impact of trade openness on the technical efficiency of the mining sector in selected SADC countries (Botswana, DRC, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe). Technical efficiency is the ability of any production process to produce maximum output from minimum quantities of inputs. A Cobb Douglas Stochastic Frontier Approach in a single-stage maximum likelihood estimation of Green’s true fixed effects was used to compute technical efficiency (scores) and the technological progress in the mining sector of SADC. Results indicate that there is no technical efficiency gains from trade liberalization during the period under study together with positive and significant technological progress. A coefficient of 0.72 suggests that a 1% increase in trade openness increases technical inefficiency in the mining sector by 0.72%. The parameter coefficient from the truncated normal distribution of the true fixed effects model indicated that technological progress from one year to the next year would lead to a 2.6% increase in the output index of the mining. Technological progress in the mining sector should target upstream mineral value chains instead of only upgrading technology in one dimension of extraction. In addition, countries should collectively and gradually put across laws that force new investments in the extraction of minerals to erect processing plants in mining value addition of host countries to re-direct economies into a growth path.

Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful to the North West University (RSA) for financing this study.