Water supply and sanitation services in South Africa a cluster analysis approach

• Main Author: Gool, Saaligha
• Other Authors: Rivett, Ulrike
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: University of Cape Town 2014
• Subjects: Civil Engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/5044

Includes abstract. === Includes bibliographical references. === Previous government policy dictated that municipal services should not be distributed equally to all South Africans. Consequently, large inequalities in access to water supply and sanitation services were created along racial and geographic lines. After 1994, government policy sort to rectify this situation, largely through pro-poor service provision policies and programs. Continuous and accurate monitoring and reporting of access statistics is crucial to ensuring that progress is made. Progress within the provinces, however, would not have been equal due to the difficulty with providing services to different regions. As such, large disparities still exist. In order to assess the current inequality, local municipalities were grouped according to access to adequate services and their progress made from 2001, using the statistical method of cluster analysis. It was discovered that provinces, with access to improved services for over 75% of households, had municipalities with similar access to adequate services; this includes Western Cape, Gauteng and Free State. For the other provinces, great inequalities were found between municipalities. Some municipalities showed a decline in access to improved services; this is despite provincial access to improved services increasing for all provinces. Cases emerged where local municipalities in the same district municipality did not show similarly changes in access to improved services. The progress between water supply and sanitation provision was dissimilar, with growth occurring in different timeframes. A large number of municipalities showed negative progress for sanitation for 2007-2011 despite the fact that the Bucket Eradication Programme – aimed at diminishing the number of bucket facilities in the country - was established in 2005. The lag in sanitation progress between 2007 and 2011 could be attributed to the fact that sanitation provision from 2007 was focussed in rural areas, which are demonstrably difficult to deliver services to; that poorly built toilets needed restoration, diverting funds from providing new facilities; and that transferring responsibility of sanitation provision from DWA to DHS in 2009 led to non-efficient functioning of the National Sanitation Programme. More provinces showed a correlation between progress made between 2001 and 2011, and prior access to adequate services for water supply than sanitation. This coupled with the fact that rural municipalities had a greater capital expenditure than other local municipalities for water supply and not for sanitation, indicates that the pro-poor initiatives have been more successful in water supply than in sanitation. This highlights that sanitation provision has been challenging and slow.