Costing shelter services

Yesterday the National Shelter Movement and the Hlanganisa Institute for Development in South Africa launched the report 'What is Rightfully Due: Costing the operations of domestic violence shelters.' I wrote the report on their behalf with the aim of trying to come up with a rational basis to the funding of shelters. Right now, shelters on the same province are funded differently and different provinces funded differently. How amounts are calculated, based on what criteria, is anybody's guess.

We have tried to upend this approach and the way it depends so much on individual officials' discretion by setting out a formula of sorts. We used three sources of information to arrive at our various amounts. These included the figures provided by the NAWONGO decision, an analysis of 17 shelters' records and a workshop with shelter staff. This gave a variable cost of R4 649/month per adult woman and R2 324/month per child. To put that into perspective: one shelter in the Free State received R4 583/month for its entire shelter population of 16 women and their children. Departmental guidelines on the use of this money meant that they had just R9/day per resident to spend on food. Not much in the way of nutrition there.

Welfare services are generally underfunded but victim empowerment particularly so. Despite what the speeches, the 16 days campaigns, the advertisements and the summits say, the money - the actual rands and cents - tells us something different. And that is that domestic violence and rape are not a priority but sit somewhere at the very bottom of the 'to do and to spend' list.