Volunteers who participated in the project last week. Picture: Supplied
Several organisations serving homeless people are hopeful that they will be able to determine the number of homeless people around certain suburbs of Cape Town before the end of next month.
This came after the U-turn Homeless Ministries, Streetscapes, Mould Empower Serve NPC, New Hope SA, The Haven Night Shelter, and Voortrekker Road Corridor CID dispatched their volunteers to count homeless people in the Cape Town CBD, the southern suburbs, the deep south and the northern suburbs on the night of Wednesday November 13.
The counting happened from 6.30pm until 11pm, according to Shentél du Toit, the spokesperson of the Mould Empower Serve NPC.
The pilot project was carried out by more than 200 volunteers who included people with lived experience of homelessness, staff members of the organisations involved and members of the public, she said.
She said the areas that were covered in this pilot project also included Rondebosch, Newlands, Claremont, Kenilworth, Muizenberg, Fish Hoek, Simon’s Town, Parow, Bellville, and Durbanville.
“The primary goal of this count was to gather accurate data on the number of people sleeping rough in Cape Town. Additionally, a sample of rough sleepers were asked additional questions on the length of time they had been homeless, reasons for being homeless, the services they are currently accessing and additional support required,” she said.
The data will also be used to measure the effectiveness of current interventions, understand service needs, and to track trends over time within the city.
Enrique Hermanus, the manager of the Parow Centre of Hope, said: “This is history in the making. We are solving homelessness and this, right here, is the first step in doing so.”
Jon Hopkins from U-turn, who co-ordinated the overall count, said the highlight of the experience for him was the teamwork to achieve the goal.
“There is no way we can tell if rough sleeping is getting worse or better within Cape Town without conducting regular point-in-time counts,” he said.
Ms Du Toit said the statistics will be submitted to the University of Pretoria to have academic support before it is made available to the public.
She was also hopeful that the data will help the City of Cape Town in its initiatives that seek to end homelessness.