Seychelles delegation visits Mogale City
Mogale City builds bridges with the Seychelles during their recent visit.
As part of the implementation of a bilateral agreement between the governments of South Africa and the Seychelles, Mogale City was chosen as one of the cities in Gauteng to host a high-level Ministry of Local Government delegation with the coastal island.
According to Mogale City Local Municipality’s head of communication Adrian Amod, this agreement identified several departments and local authorities in South Africa to engage and work with the Seychelles for purposes of creating mutual commercial, cultural and other benefits that will see strengthened ties between the two countries.
“The delegation’s visit is timely as Mogale City is on the verge of implementing a revised international and intergovernmental approach. This approach, among others, aims to reposition the city as outward-looking, and can thus attract investments, and improve its work with local partners and communities. The process of repositioning the city will be built on a solid foundation of its competitive and comparative advantages,” Amod said
Accompanied and facilitated by the South African Local Government Association (Salga), the Seychelles delegation was led by Principal Secretary Kevin Pereni, joined by the Director General and five administrators representing various portfolios within their government.
Although the coastal country has a menial population of 131 000 people, several opportunities for engaging and fostering collaboration with Mogale City were identified. These sought key learnings among others were on public participation,
South Africa has significantly improved its localisation of Sustainable Development Goals, fostering small and medium-sized enterprises, diversifying economic sectors, and implementing a Voluntary Local Review (VLR). South Africa was one of only nine other countries that submitted 10 VLRs to the United Nations in one go.
Mogale City was one of the 10 municipalities in SA that completed a VLR for the first time in July.
The areas of interest from their end have also been propelled by government land scarcity, a saturated tourism market and other growing challenges.
Engagements between the two parties led to an agreement that will enable continuous collaboration and thus form part of the national agreement between South Africa and Seychelles facilitated by Salga. It was also agreed that a small team be constituted to crystalise specific areas of collaboration.
It is anticipated that the road map in this instance will include a follow-up discussion during next year’s second National Urban Forum that South Africa will be hosting.
