Cape Town - The City of Cape Town has appointed its fourth all-female road repair team in Heideveld, the City said on Wednesday.
The all-female roads repair team, consisting of six women from Gugulethu and Heideveld, forms part of the Women at Work Programme, said the City’s mayoral committee member for Transport for Cape Town, Councillor Brett Herron.
The programme, which forms part of the City’s Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP), is nestled within Transport for Cape Town (TCT) and the team is based at TCT’s Heideveld depot.
Herron said Heideveld residents would see the all-female team hard at work in their community “fixing potholes and doing maintenance work on footways and stormwater pipes in their suburb”.
The team would be deployed in Heideveld, Manenberg, Tambo Village, Athlone, Surrey Estate and the areas next to Jakes Gerwel Drive.
He added that the Women at Work initiative was a “gender transformation programme within Transport Cape Town”.
Herron said the city’s Women at Work programme was having a positive impact and had been nominated for the fourth annual Women in Construction Awards in the category for the most innovative women’s programme. The Awards are scheduled to take place in Johannesburg on May 10. Herron said he expected the programme to be “recognised on a national level as one of the most advanced and game-changing gender transformation projects in the country”.
He said that since the Women at Work Programme first started, it had benefited a total of 24 women who would exit the programme in June. The next step, Herron said, was to “establish ten all-female road repair teams accommodating another 60 women in the next financial year”.
Pointing out that women constitute only 3,4 percent of the workforce involved in roads and stormwater infrastructure maintenance, Herron said the City was working hard in “tackling gender transformation in the transport realm, as women are generally under-represented in the transport sector”.
Herron said the women selected for the programme were employed for ten months, a period during which they developed skills that would see them “better equipped to find placement in the permanent job market”.
African News Agency