Thank you, hon House Chair. I will not follow them. I was a Speaker once - Speaker and Deputy Speaker.
I spoke here about social infrastructure in rural areas. I spoke about economic infrastructure in rural areas. I spoke about cultural facilities, ICT infrastructure and resource planning capacity for women. If you don't deal with those things in the rural areas, you are not going to have an impact on the hardships that are experienced by women.
I will give a few examples. An hon member spoke about 36 women in Giyani who need a pack shed because they produce and sell. But as long as they don't have a pack shed where they can keep their produce and preserve it, they do not have full control over the market. So we built that for them.
They use an engine to irrigate. One of their engines was stolen. So we had to build a small room for them to keep their engines in. These are women who live in the village. They have got a market with Spar. This is a very important economic infrastructure development.
I spoke of social infrastructure. If you look at the health side of things, this affects women more than men. We had a secondary and a primary school with no ablution facilities. What does that say about health?
This government prioritises health. One of the first things that we did was to build 4x4 ablution blocks in both of the schools so that we can deal with the health aspect of the community. Again, you are actually impacting on the lives of women because they constitute the majority there.
The question of a market for women in rural areas as they produce needs to be addressed, because that's what they do. They have small gardens - some of them are relatively big. They produce. But they need a market.
In Dutywa, in the Eastern Cape, we constructed, in that department - I thought the MEC would say that - an agripark. In this agripark, we have 35 hectares. We constructed a vegetable processing plant. And this we did in conjunction with Fort Hare. That was for women because out there it is the women who are producing vegetables.
At the moment, if you go there, you can buy soup powder. That is from women growing vegetables and selling them. What is left in excess, they sell. This does a couple of other things for women, because it creates an opportunity for women to sell, as a market, as well as to create relatively sophisticated job opportunities and then for them to be trained. If you follow that through, you will find that, again, that talks to economic infrastructure.
If you look at the rural employment and training model of the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform, you will find that it is household- based. We are going to Mkhondo on the 30th and 31st of this month. I heard the hon member Phosa saying that there were 4 000 households there. That's exactly the point. Our model is based on households. For every household, we are going to contract one person. That person will be paid in terms of the principles of the Expanded Public Works Programme.
This has to do with creating opportunities for women to work. They will be contracted for two years. They will work; they will train. That's exactly the process we are going through in terms of our facilitation in the Free State. We are doing that because we want women to benefit from these programmes and to transform their lives using social infrastructure development and economic infrastructure development.
We are saying that when you contract, 50% of what you are earning must go to the household, and you can do whatever you want to do with the other 50%. We want to relieve the stress on women, not only by creating jobs, but also by making sure that there is food in that household for two years. We will train them. Finally, the most important thing is the social impact on women.
Firstly, we will employ them for two unbroken years using the principles of the EPWP, which say that at least 60% of employees must be women. We have discussed that. We engaged them. We said to them that we wanted them to postpone pregnancy for at least two years. That is the impact, and we want the hon members here to judge us on that. That is the first aspect. Secondly, we said that, as a result, we want to reduce the HIV infection rate because, in order for them to delay pregnancy, they must use condoms. The government has not been able to force young men and women to use condoms. We hope that this is going to happen.
Thirdly, we want to reduce the dependence on social grants by young women. It is the young women, and not the men, who are negatively affected by this. Fourthly, we want to reduce petty crimes, particularly domestic violence.
All of these things are factors that affect women more than they do men. That is how we want the government to be judged. It all has to do with us wanting to impact positively on the lives of women, especially young women. This is what we will do in every province we go to. We are in the Free State. We have started in KwaZulu-Natal and in the Eastern Cape. We are now going to two provinces which we have not touched on: Mpumalanga and the North West. We are going to Mpumalanga at the end of this month.
We will focus on the household because women are the people who are often heads of households, whether they are working in the mines or wherever. I went to Hlobane in KwaZulu-Natal, and I was shocked to find women in an old hostel. They are the ones who carry water. They live upstairs. They carry water upstairs because the facility does not allow them to have a tap up there. They carry water upstairs, wash there and then they have to bring the bucket down to throw the water out. These are women. That is what the programme of government is supposed to do in order to impact on women positively. That is what we are doing as the government.
Therefore, when we say, as government, that we are talking about social infrastructure, we mean this thing that has to do with constructing ablution facilities to improve the quality of health of our people. When we talk about economic infrastructure, we talk about creating village markets where women can grow and sell their produce, get jobs and feed their children.
ICT infrastructure is very important. When we talk about cultural progress, we are talking about rural women not having to go into the city in order to see the World Cup, if it's possible. Let them stay home. Let's provide this infrastructure at home. We are talking about women who can access information through the Internet from where they are in the rural areas. That is why we are building these Thusong centres, including at Muyexe where we built one.
The hon Bahlekazi [sirs] will perhaps be happy about this. We built one that is standing there. The community came together with their children and said that it was too small and that they would like it to be a traditional council chamber. They showed us a site where to build a new one.
That, again, tells you that now they feel they can make a decision, because you cannot emancipate women when they are unable to make these fundamental decisions, even against you as the government. You need to be able to say, "Fine, we thought that centre would be fine there, but we have learnt. We understand now. It can't be there." The community should be able to say, "This is what we want you to do. That's where we want you to build this centre."
We will. We have to respond to it because the majority of the people we are dealing with there are women. Why they decided to turn what we referred to as a Thusong centre into a traditional house, we don't know, but that's what they want. Thank you very much. [Applause.]