On 27 July 2022 the Department of Transport and Public Works (DTPW) hosted the second Western Cape Infrastructure Framework (WCIF) Reboot workshop at the University of Stellenbosch Business School in Bellville.
Stakeholder champions from the broader infrastructure ecosystem, including participants from parastatals, government organisations and higher education institutions, were tasked with reimagining the future of infrastructure by framing the challenges and opportunities to be addressed through the WCIF, identifying key infrastructure polarities that will need to be managed over time, setting out a common “picture of future success” WCIF Vision, and becoming clear about the way forward to deliver success.
As custodians of the WCIF, staff members from DTPW’s Infrastructure Policies and Strategies directorate started the WCIF Reboot journey in July 2021 with the Project Charter and Inception Report. The team aims to complete the journey with the finalisation of the WCIF by December 2022.
“It is critically important for us to understand that planning for infrastructure can no longer be as it was yesterday,” said Nazeer Rahbeeni, Acting Chief Director: Policy & Strategy Integration.
“A new way of reframing where we are going to, not only looking at data from the past in order to create these trend lines or extrapolation lines of where we are going, but to reorientate ourselves in the sense that let’s determine what the preferred future is and work our way backwards and then determine what problems do we need to solve in order to get to the preferred future”, he added.
Designing a holistic, sustainable, enabling framework for the planning and successful delivery of citizen-centric public sector infrastructure in the Western Cape is challenging, but entirely possible through successful collaboration and future-oriented thinking.