Community involvement - Ga-Motlatla village

Ga-Motlatla is a village of approximately 600 households situated about 40 km west of Ventersdorp in the Northwest Province in South Africa. This village has transformed itself in a period of about 4 years from a totally neglected “black spot” settlement to a thriving community with basic services of water, electricity, automatic telephones, communal gardens and controlled (fenced) ranches for community herds. The seed for the success was sowed through the Ga-Motlatla Village Development project which was initiated by the Independent Development Trust under its Relief Development Programme during the drought in 1992. This paper examines the approach to the involvement of the community in the project and argues that the innovative and flexible manner in which this was done is directly responsible for the ability of the community, not only to sustain the projects long beyond the relief period but, in addition, to initiate other development projects that have transformed the Village to what it is today.