The Water Dialogues

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Members The Water Dialogue - South Africa

APF, anti-privatisation forum
City of Johannesburg, Contract Management Unit
Durban Metro, municipality
DWAF, Department of Water Affairs and Forestry, national government
EMG, Environmental Monitoring Group, environmental and developmental NGO
Jowam, Johannesburg Water Management Company
Mvula Trust, water and sanitation NGO
Rand Water, public provider
SA Water Caucus, Network - South African Civil Society Water Caucus
SAAWU, South African Association of Water Utilities
SALGA, South African local government association
SAMWU, South African municipal workers union Treasury, national government
WIN, Water Information Network
WRC, Water Research Commission
WSSA, Water services company, private company, rural water supply and sanitation projects.

Profile: South Africa

Key challenges

South Africa is a very diverse country – physically and culturally - with a population of 48-million people. South Africa’s new Constitution gives everyone the right to have access to sufficient water, and places a positive duty on the state to take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realisation of this right.

Even the best Constitution in the world is not enough to remedy large water services backlogs at the scale and pace required.

Pre-1994 apartheid policies continue to cast a long shadow over equitable access to water services, and the country as a whole faces the prospect of growing water scarcity.

Water scarcity

South Africa is a semi-arid country with an average rainfall of 450mm per year - well below the world average of about 860 mm per year. Rainfall is seasonal and varies considerably across the country. South Africa is the 30th driest country in terms of available freshwater per capita, and economic development and changing rainfall patterns are expected to exacerbate scarcity in some areas further.

Eradicating backlogs

Since the advent of democracy in 1994, government has led a dedicated programme to extend water and sanitation services to those previously unserved; the greatest service backlogs are in rural areas and on the urban periphery.

The programme began under the new government’s Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP), and is now implemented in line with a national Strategic Framework for Water Services. The Department of Water Affairs and Forestry is overall sector leader and custodian of the country’s water resources, but, since 2003, local government has taken full responsibility for ensuring access to water services in all areas. Decentralisation of responsibility has coincided with increasingly urgent pressure to address service backlogs.

Gains

There have been substantial gains since 1994. By early 2005, an additional 15-million people had access to basic and higher levels of water supply, and 8.2-million more people had access to at least basic sanitation. A national programme of providing the first 6 kilolitres of water per household per month to all poor households has been implemented since 2001 in a growing number of municipalities. But nine million people in South Africa still do not have access to potable water within 200m of their homes, and the figures for sanitation are far higher.

The public sector as driver

In South Africa, the public sector is very much in the driving seat of water services provision. Through grant-funded programmes, government is investing heavily in ambitious infrastructure delivery initiatives and pro-poor service delivery programmes.

Privatisation in the water sector is limited, and seems unlikely to increase significantly; there are examples of concessions and corporatisation, but these are exceptions. Recent legislation emphatically precludes the sale of municipal assets necessary for delivery of basic services.

Debates

In view of the challenges facing the South African water sector – in particular, the need for strong technical and managerial skills to drive service planning and sustainable delivery – the key debates hinge on how best the public sector can leverage available resources (skills, funds, potential partnerships, and so on) to ensure affordable and sustainable services.

The Water Dialogues offer a valuable opportunity to reflect on our experience to date, and explore new options.

The Water Dialogues process in South Africa

Inception

A diverse group of stakeholders met for the first time on the 10th March 2005 at the national department of Water Affairs and Forestry to discuss whether it would be useful to conduct a review in South Africa on private sector participation in water and sanitation.

There was agreement that a review of this nature could be useful, provided it was aligned with national reform and policy processes, and included both public and private sector delivery. The emphasis should be on how to improve public sector delivery, particularly in poorly resourced municipalities.

Since then, this multi-stakeholder working group has met every two to three months, refining exactly what will be done, why it will be done and how it will be done. These conversations have resulted in

an agreed problem statement to guide the dialogue and research a code of conduct to articulate how we will work together closer agreement on the questions we will ask through the research and draft evaluation criteria against which to measure our findings.

Participation, governance and support

The National Working Group (NWG) is comprised of national and local government, advocacy and service delivery NGOs, labour, the private sector, research institutions and water utilities.

It meets at a government-funded agency, the Water Research Commission. Participants fund their own time and transport, with support for transport available where required. The Environmental Monitoring Group has played an interim co-ordination role, and facilitates the participation of civil society, with financial support from the Heinrich Böll Foundation. The Department of Water Affairs and Forestry has played a role in liaising with potential donors.

A full list of NWG members is attached.

Questions, themes and research methodology

South Africa is still finalising the research methodology, questions and case studies. There has been agreement on the broad approach, preliminary themes, role of the national working group and role of the research team. A process is in place to develop criteria to select case studies, and questions will be further refined to address the agreed problem statement:

Municipalities in South Africa face many challenges in meeting the constitutional requirements to ensure effective, equitable and sustainable delivery of water supply and sanitation to all. This is taking into account the highly skewed distribution of wealth, service provision and water resources.

In the efforts to address these challenges a number of different approaches to service delivery including commercial approaches and PSP have been used.

This Multistakeholder Review provides the opportunity to create a constructive dialogue to identify, critically analyse and evaluate these approaches leading to greater understanding of service delivery models. It is envisaged that this understanding will lead to more effective service delivery models to contribute to universal supply of safe water and sanitation.

Questions have been clustered under the following themes:

local governance, regulation and monitoring, tariffs and cost recovery, participation and information disclosure, impacts of different water services delivery models on poor people, environment, corporatisation, finance, social impact assessment, contracts and outsourcing, labour, health

Reports & documents

Minutes from the meetings

10 March 2005 (record of meeting) (Word 21 KB)

9 June 2005 (Email record of meeting) (Word 21KB)

4 August 2005 (Word 46 KB)

5 October 2005 (Word 40KB)

18 January 2006 (Word 42KB)

15 March 2006 (Word 26 KB)

April 2006 (Word 29KB)

9 June (Word 53KB)

26 July 2006 (Word 43KB)

29 September 2006 (Word 62KB)

23 February 2007 (Word 63KB)

3 April 2007 (Word 36KB)