In the next 18 months, water recycling will be prioritised in Makana, local schools will be chatting in realtime to schools in Finland and artists may have a chance of experiencing the art and culture of Finland.
In the next 18 months, water recycling will be prioritised in Makana, local schools will be chatting in realtime to schools in Finland and artists may have a chance of experiencing the art and culture of Finland.
Officials from Raseborg Municipality, which recently entered into a partnership with Makana Municipality, are in town for a working session that is focusing on water and waste management. This comes after Infrastructure Development Portfolio Committee Councillor Nomhle Gaga and Water and Sewerage Manager, Mongesi Mabece, were in Finland earlier this month to attend working sessions on water management.
The Finnish delegation arrived on Wednesday and were greeted by the Makana councillors and officials with a dinner.
Coming straight from a mayoral imbizo, to provide the community service-delivery highlights, Executive Mayor Zamuxolo Peter welcomed the delegation, saying that the municipality prided itself in this partnership.
"This is indeed a historic partnership with Raseborg Municipality. We are the only municipality in the Eastern Cape, or even in the country, that is forging [such a]partnership."
Zamuxolo was at pains to emphasise that they were not merely paying lip-service to the link-up. "It is a partnership in practise. Our partnership revolves around education and ensuring we have clean water… We are going to make sure we hit the ground running."
Municipal Manager, Ntombi Baart, said the partnership was in the implementation phase. Funding of R500 000 had been provided for this beginning phase which would look at the areas of water, education and IT. In the next 18 months water-recycling would be prioritised, Grahamstown schools would soon be chatting in real-time to schools in Finland through an interactive web-based school-to-school programme, which could be used as an educational and social tool.
"The schools in Finland want to learn English. In our case, we want to learn maths and science. We want to ensure that those schools have the IT infrastructure." Baart said they had asked the education department to identify which five schools should benefit from the programme. She said schools which were not hosting the programme could be brought to the host schools to take part.
The three-year co-operation plan, supported by the South African Embassy, began on the basis that both municipalities are festival towns. Baart said there were future plans to establish an exchange programme between the two municipalities for artists to visit each other's festivals.
The City of Raseborg is a new municipality, established in 2009 as a merger of three municipalities: Ekenas, Karis and Pohja. The former municipality of Pohja is traditionally an industrial area, whereas Karis has always been an important crossing-place for the railway, thus transport is its main industry. Ekenas is a well-known tourist resort, with its beautiful archipelago (some 1 300 islands) visited by thousands of tourists during the summer. Information sourced from Makana Municipality
