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Project Background
Worldwide more than one billion people lack a safe water supply, while two and a half billion have no access to sanitation. To remedy this situation some actors have promoted the involvement of the private sector in service delivery, while others have opposed this, maintaining that public delivery is preferable and no profit should be made from water services. This conflict is having a significant negative impact on progress in delivering services. |
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During the 2001 International Conference on Freshwater in Bonn, a multi-stakeholder working group was established to oversee an international scoping process on water and the private sector. In 2004, a strong majority of the participants at the International Stakeholder Workshop in Berlin agreed that a multi-stakeholder review of water supply and sanitation was needed, stating:
| The overarching goal of a multi-stakeholder review is to contribute to making progress towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for water supply and sanitation, prioritising the need to achieve for the poor the human right of affordable and sustainable access to water and sanitation, and to attain the long-term goals of universal access and poverty eradication. |
This resulted in an international initiative, The Water Dialogues, to bring the range of views and constituencies round the table to constructively discuss, review and analyse the role of the private sector in water supply and sanitation. It was also agreed that the review would take place via national processes feeding into an international process.
South Africa is one of five participating countries, including Uganda, Brazil, Indonesia, and the Philippines, that have initiated a review process guided by a multi-stakeholder Working Group.
Municipalities in South Africa face many challenges in meeting the constitutional requirements to ensure effective, equitable, and sustainable delivery of water supply and sanitation, provided affordably 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 Private Sector Participation (PSP) have been used.
The WD-SA Working Group agreed to focus its review on both public and private sector delivery, with emphasis on how to improve public sector delivery, particularly in less well resourced municipalities.
WD-SA has developed a brochure to communicate the background, vision and goals of the project. An additional version of the brochure was created to distribute when inviting communities to participate in the research; the community brochure is available in English and the mother-tongue languages of the communities.
WD-SA Community Brochure:
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