Partnerships key to overcoming SA water value chain challenges

8th November 2019

By: Natasha Odendaal

Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

     

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Partnership in all its forms – public–private partnerships (PPPs), community and catchment-based approaches and corporate water stewardship – will be critical to South Africa overcoming the significant challenges faced across the water sector.

Concerted collaborative efforts and the presentation of holistic and inclusive solutions from both the public and private sectors can unlock new financing and mitigate the various obstacles to delivering reliable and equitable water and sanitation services to all South Africans.

This emerged at the fifth yearly Water Stewardship conference, held in Johannesburg during October, where participants noted ‘transformative initiatives’ that exemplified how new models of collaboration could provide significant potential for impact and scale.

The event was hosted by the Strategic Water Partners Network (SWPN), the Natural Resources Stewardship Programme, the National Business Initiative (NBI) and the Royal Danish Embassy.

South Africa’s water sector has long grappled with financial challenges and capacity restrictions.

Currently, only 65% of South Africans have access to safe and reliable water services and 14.1-million people lack access to decent sanitation.

The SWPN reiterates the need for R33-billion each year over the next ten years to achieve water security, far surpassing the current Department of Human Settlements, Water and Sanitation (DHSWS) budget of R15.5-billion.

“A lack of investment in South Africa’s water infrastructure and maintenance has resulted in 56% of South Africa’s 1 150 wastewater treatment works and 44% of domestic water treatment works being categorised as being in poor or critical condition and in need of urgent rehabilitation,” the SWPN notes.

Further exacerbating the financing gap is the 41% of municipal water that does not generate any revenue.

Opportunities for pursuing PPPs within the water value chain were considered at the conference, with indications that the PPP mold is increasingly becoming a popular tool among public-service organisations to secure efficient delivery of and accessibility to public goods and mitigate the risks.

Beyond the normal functions that the private sector might take on, such as design and construction, PPPs can extend into areas such as project financing, staffing and the operation of specific assets, delegates heard.

There were three main categories of benefits that municipalities could leverage by deploying a PPP model, said eThekwini municipality senior commercial and business manager Dhevan Govender.

eThekwini has a number of PPP projects under way.

“PPPs are the way to go to improve access to basic services, increase quality and efficiency of services, and mobilise capital. The public sector has the vision and the private sector has the technology and capital, and PPPs enable us to leverage these to deliver sustainable projects,” he adds.

A recent NBI report shows that 28 of the 144 municipalities assessed demonstrate good PPP potential in one form or another, with the City of Johannesburg, the eThekwini municipality, the City of Cape Town and the Ekurhuleni municipality determined to be the most PPP- suitable municipalities in the country.

“Within the water value chain itself, the major opportunities lie in desalination, wastewater treatment, water reuse and nonrevenue water, followed by broader opportunities in water supply infrastructure,” the report outlines.

Community-owned water solutions and catchment-based partnerships are another type of collaborative approach being successfully implemented across South Africa.

“Corporate water stewardship, which used to largely exist on the sidelines of business operations, has evolved significantly over the past decade from the realm of corporate social responsibility and emerged as a proven alternative model to address water security challenges beyond the fence line of a company’s operations.”

SWPN adviser Nicholas Tandi adds that water stewardship started off as a pathfinder in the mid-2000s, developing into its own in 2012, offering significant guidelines and frameworks that form the basis of the modern corporate water stewardship profile.

“We can always improve frameworks, but we have a good starting point,” he says.

“The scale of the crisis we face today is unprecedented, but it is a collective crisis, meaning that the consequences of inaction will affect us all,” says DHSWS chief director for regulation Ndileka Mohapi.

“Partnership is therefore of the utmost importance, and I would like to ensure that we move together to take the opportunity to work together as partners to leverage the full scale of benefits available to us to overcome this shared challenge.”

Edited by Martin Zhuwakinyu
Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

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