Challenges faced by the independent development trust in supporting the KwaZulu-Natal provincial government’s infrastructure delivery.

Abstract

This research was set to investigate the major factors accounting for the challenges faced by Independent Development Trust (IDT) in the infrastructure delivery of the provincial government of KwaZulu-Natal. The research looked mainly at the root causes of delays and budgetary overruns and the resultant effect on service delivery back-logs and the socio-economic impact caused by such delays. The study was conducted on professional stakeholders in the built environment. These included specialists and professionals in the engineering, construction management, civil and general building fields. The objectives of this study were achieved by means of a 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 the data analysis used was descriptive with a few inferential statistics to arrive at some generalisations and conclusions. This study was able to affirm that there are major inefficiencies in the current infrastructure delivery model of the South African government. The major causes identified included factors such as delays in payments, poor planning, subsiding levels of professional ethics and standards exercised by professionals in the built environment. The study has also made some recommendations from the research findings. Clearly the infrastructure delivery model requires a new trajectory in tackling under-development and the triple challenges of poverty, unemployment and slow economic growth.