South Africa is well on its way to meet the United Nations Mil-lennium Development Goals (UNMDG), Provincial and Local Government Minister Sydney Mufamadi said this week.

South Africa is well on its way to meet the United Nations Mil-lennium Development Goals (UNMDG), Provincial and Local Government Minister Sydney Mufamadi said this week.

He was speaking at the Public Private Partnership round-table conference on what the public and private sector can do to redress current backlogs in service deli-very and infrastructure provision.

"As a country, we have set ourselves a target that is even more ambitious than the glo-bal one," he said.

While Africa was reportedly in danger of failing to achieve the UN's goals of reducing levels of poverty by half by 2015, Mufamadi said South Africa was on track and had brought the deadline forward by a year.

He noted that the government hoped to eradicate the bucket system by the end of this year. All communities would have access to clean potable water by next year and electricity by 2012.

President Thabo Mbeki recently said during his state of the nation speech that the government had surpassed its target of providing people with basic water. There has been an improvement in the percentage of the population with access to clean, drinkable water from 59 percent to 85 percent, he said.

Mufamadi said that public-private partnerships between business and the government had helped municipalities to increase their technical, financial, planning, and project management skills.

This collective effort, he said, had resulted in the government having more money to spend on services such as education, health, policing, water and sanitation, energy, housing, and infrastructure provision. - Sapa