It is required by Parliament that after the budget is tabled, all the committees discuss the budget. This committee, like all the other committees, is meant to submit a report on their views on the budget.
The complication for this committee is that all the other committees are sectoral committees, so they concentrate on the health budget or whatever budget. This one has the whole budget to look at.
What I do is draft a report for them. We then have a workshop where we go through that report. They make the changes they want, and then it gets submitted under their name.
Over the last four or five years, the committee has focused its attention on what it sees as the biggest problems facing women in South Africa--HIV/AIDS, poverty, unemployment, and violence against women. So what I do for them at first glance is look through all the departments that could have an impact on those three issues and pull out what they are promising to do and what budget report they did the previous year.
With regard to the biannual aspect, they usually call me in at the end of the year. This year--in fact, last month--I tried to show them how they could use the annual reports of the committees that get tabled in September to monitor what happened with the budget of the previous year.
It really goes back to what I was saying and what Nancy was saying, that you have you to do this by saying not only what is allocated but also what actually happens to that money and the results that come from it.