they often treat unemployment as a transient problem and are merely effective for the short term following an emergency or an economic shock but rarely stimulate job creation in the private sector or offer longterm solutions to unemployment or underemployment often the programmes are not located in regions with the highest rates of poverty or unemployment an assessment of seven public works programmes in south africa for instance found that some districts with very high poverty and unemployment had no labourintensive public works projects while other districts with low poverty rates had four or more projects adato and haddad