How Durban Set the Global Standard for Providing Water and Sanitation for the Poor

Arguably the most elegant aspect of an inelegant subject is how this city of 3.2 million residents, South Africa’s second largest, is solving monumental water and waste challenges in its jammed informal settlements

The eThekwini Municipality Water and Sanitation department, Durban’s water and waste management provider, avoided paying for huge and expensive equipment, big pipelines, and complicated sewage disposal practices of centralized water and sanitation systems. Instead it deployed a decentralized strategy and less expensive tools that worked.

The centerpiece of Durban’s program is the “community ablution block” public washroom. It’s an ordinary marine cargo container refitted inside with running water in sinks and wash basins, toilets and showers. Durban has 2,500 ablution blocks installed in many of its nearly 500 informal settlements, where homes made of scrap wood and corrugated metal don’t have running water or toilets. There’s sufficient public funding to fabricate and install perhaps 80 more ablution blocks annually.

Durban is also a testbed for numerous strategies that turn human waste into usable compost or in other ways dispose of urine and feces without using fresh water to do it. But Durban’s most important innovation is its unwavering commitment to actually providing water and waste services to the poor. City leaders view providing fresh water, showers and clean toilets to more than 1 million residents in the city’s informal settlements as a moral responsibility. So many other big cities — Delhi, Lima, Manila, Mexico City, Mumbai, Ulan Bator — don’t really care.

Influenced by cost considerations and class neglect, leaders of these and so many other cities in the developing world decided long ago to ignore the water needs of the new residents pouring in from the countryside to seek jobs. The newcomers crowd dirty and dangerous slums and spend too much of their time appealing to city governments for basic water and sanitation. Without it, parents and children rely on contaminated water, much of it collected from rooftops, and defecate in the horror show of open pits. According to the United Nations, more than 2.4 billion people around the world live this way.

Not in Durban. “The city decided it’s our responsibility to service these areas,” says Teddy Gounden, the acting project manager for the eThekwini (pronounced ett-ta-kweeny) Water and Sanitation unit. “People demanded our service. One third of the more than 3 million people who live here are in the settlements. It was not a good situation. It’s much better now.”

Right to water

It’s been said that the virtues of a nation truly cannot be known until the condition of its poorest residents are considered. By that measure Durban’s water program is a recognized global leader and a decided point of national pride in a country that is experiencing its worst days in the 22-year post-Apartheid era. Two years ago, Durban was honored with the Stockholm Industry Water Award, one of the most prestigious international prizes for water work in the public interest.

Influenced by surprising and destabilizing changes in the cabinet of President Jacob Zuma, and crashing commodity prices for the country’s mineral exports, the South African rand has slid in value to its lowest level ever. In January, the business confidence index fell to its worst-ever rating. National meteorologists project that a deep drought, already a year old, will persist until the end of 2016. Agronomists project a massive crop failure that will necessitate importing half of South Africa’s grain. Layoffs in the farm sector caused by moisture scarcity and unplanted fields lifted the country’s persistent joblessness to more than 35 percent. Cities ran out of water last fall. Crime is endemic and getting worse.

The endowment of optimism and progress that South Africans embraced at the start of the new multi-racial elections and the formal end of Apartheid in 1994 has dissolved into a period of deepening economic and social stress.

Durban, a handsome and sunbright city of broad hills that cascade down to wide Indian Ocean beaches, has managed to push through the turmoil. In part that’s due to the commitment to social justice and equity held by its leaders, and expressed in South Africa’s 1996 constitution. The special provisions that hold the nation accountable to ensure public access to clean water and sound health are globally unique.

The Bill of Rights declares that all South Africans possess “the right to have access to sufficient food and water.” The 1998 National Water Act requires water managers to provide “equitable allocation and beneficial use of water.”

“We can’t separate the approach eThekwini has taken from the policy of the country,” says Chris Buckley, a chemical engineering professor and head of the Pollution Research Group at Durban’s University of KwaZulu-Natal. “No other developing country has such a high priority on water and sanitation. If your national policies are different, there is going to be a disconnect. The policy foundation supports innovation and problem-solving in Durban.”

Vusi Gebashe, a 51-year-old city councilor from the city’s crowded Ward 55, told me that he and his colleagues are very supportive of the water department. Its work in the informal settlements is viewed as a basic operating expense of local government, like police and fire protection. “The city supports this regardless of the next election and who is on the council,” Gebashe says. “We’ve been the main drivers of the project. It’s been like that for all ten years that I’ve been a councilor. The city is behind this. Councilors support this. If you move around Durban you discover that people are happy with it.”

Source: Citiscope

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Taxonomy

• Sanitation & Hygiene
• Water Supply
• Infrastructure