DESIGN OF A CAPABILITY MATURITY FRAMEWORK (CMF) FOR RESILIENT INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT (RIM) IN RURAL MUNICIPALITIES IN SOUTH AFRICA

Abstract

Cities worldwide are often faced with manpower capacity deficits to develop and manage infrastructure. There remain discrepancies between global SDG aspirations and national realities in most Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries in achieving universal access to services by 2030. Service provision in South African municipalities has been beset by deficient engineering skills (ES) and infrastructure management (IM) capabilities as a result. IM capabilities are crucial enablers for continuous service provision. Yet, on the contrary, in South Africa, nearly 58% of all engineering professionals are found in metropolitan municipalities, with some 9% placed in urban municipalities. Furthermore, 67% of all the professionals, technicians, and engineers in the municipal system countrywide are employed in only 27 of the 257 municipalities. There is a notable lack of resilient IM in South African rural (category B4) municipalities. Likewise, current Capability Maturity Models (CMM) are rendered inappropriate for rural municipalities. Thus, this on-going research contends for prominent structural shifts in improving IM capabilities in rural municipalities, arguing that previous engineering capacity building programmes omitted the resilience component in their design parameters. The on-going study aims to design a capability maturity framework for resilient IM in rural municipalities following sequential multi-data collection procedures, pilot interviews with experts, then a survey questionnaire. Descriptive statistics will be used to analyze the survey data and thematic analysis for analyzing the qualitative data. In terms of contribution to academia, it is hoped that the on-going study would assist category B4 municipalities to close the resilience gap in infrastructure management.