Government is committed to creating the conditions for a better life for all of our people. Government cannot work without your support. We need you as partners. We are partners in mobilizing society for change, in mobilizing for a better life for all. This is why we have created Stakeholder Forums in all our provinces as a means of ensuring we work together.

We are here to persuade you that you have a critical role to play in changing your lives with government support and assistance.

Our Forums are aimed at creating a basis for community leaders to play a role in supporting South Africa to achieve its national objectives. We want all of you to become full participants in building a new thriving society in which every person can make a difference.

Home Affairs requires this commitment from Forum members and all of you because the work we do is critical to building a better South Africa.

Home Affairs has created a secure and reliable National Population Register for South Africa. We want all of you to be on that Register so that your identity is secure. We don't want anyone to steal your identity. We want our Forums to help the people understand the vital importance of Home Affairs to our national security.

Our objectives are simple and clear:

• Register all children within 30 days of birth
• Encourage all 16 year olds to apply for IDs
• Campaign against fraud and corruption
• Speed up the time we take to issue visas and permits
• Put citizens first.

We are building these broad alliances with all stakeholders to foster positive national identity. We want to work with you as part of a social compact for unity and development.

The Stakeholder Forums can be a dynamic force for community empowerment and service delivery. All of us know that we have tried such initiatives before. These forums are there to assist us meet our objectives as Home Affairs. They will help us bring services closer to the people and know our communities better.

The National Development Plan devotes a lot of space to the concept of an active and engaged citizenry. It suggests that we need to move away from waiting for services to reach us and instead play a leading role in ensuring we bring services to our communities.

All who access these services should be on the National Populations Register and should have IDs.

Much remains to be done; we are ready to double our efforts. The lessons learned from research show that to be really successful, we in government need appropriate support from the broad community, local leaders, political parties and provincial government.

Since 1994, South Africa has made tremendous progress in achieving a number of developmental objectives, including building democratic institutions, maintaining macroeconomic stability, decreasing non-income poverty and inequality through increasing access to basic services and, more recently, improving trends in levels of crime and health.

Since 1994 the government, working together with the people, has:

• Provided a monthly social grant for over 15m people
• Built about 3m million new houses,
• Provided clean water to an extra nine million people,
• Brought health services within easier reach millions of rural people by building 500 new clinics,
• Provided free schooling to about 7 million learners each year,
• Brought about over four million new electricity connections,
• Provided a free daily meal to over five millions primary school children every year,
• Social grants now cover over 15m people, unemployment and compensation funds run by government assist people who lose their jobs or get injured.

The National Development Plan is helping us to make plans for the future that will create more jobs so that more of our people can be lifted out of poverty. We are also working hard to improve health and education so that our human resources are strengthened.
The housing subsidy which the government introduced � and which has resulted in the building of about 3 millionhouses - helps people to get a very basic house. Government has increased the subsidy many times, but we cannot build bigger houses without cuting down the number of people we help.
The government has introduced new legislation to encourage banks to make housing finance more accessible to poorer people.

We know that some builders have not been adhering to basic building standards. We have set up better contols and checks to make sure that better quality houses are built.
This launch confirms that we are ready to work hard to ensure all the goals we have set are achieved. I look forward to working with the Gauteng Forum to achieve our objective of a secure, reliable National Population Register.