Sanitation for South African Urban Informal Settlements

Goal: A comparative case study of sanitation services for informal settlements in three South African cities to find ways to improve the sustainability and equity of services in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg conducted between 2012-2016.

 

Context

Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg are three of the largest cities in South Africa. They all face the challenge of trying to provide sustainable and equitable services to informal settlements, which are often located in difficult to service areas that are considered difficult to service for various reasons including ownership, geographical features, distance from existing service networks, ownership, politics, etc. 

 

Free Basic Sanitation (FBSan) is a national policy that was developed to help address this need by supporting municipalities to provide a subsidized basic level of sanitation service to qualified beneficiaries.  Each municipality developed its own local approaches to providing FBSan, but some of the common concerns and approaches included: providing interim/temporary services until permanent housing opportunities are provided, trying to avoid 'fruitless expenditure', looking for alternatives to waterborne systems, dealing with negative perceptions of alternative systems, a struggle to plan for informal settlement development because of the inherent uncertainty of unregulated development.  

 

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Challenge

How to make sanitation services to informal settlements more sustainable and equitable than the current state?

 

Findings

In the context of extreme socio-economic inequality, equity can be viewed as both a means to sustainability and an important end in and of itself.

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Sustainability trade-offs

• Resource intensive but equal level of service for all

• Push to eliminate sanitation backlogs in shortest time frame without long-term plans

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Equity trade-off

Providing different levels of service to different regions of the city perpetuates perceptions of inequality and/or discrimination, but is required given limited resources

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Overlap

Supporting ‘some, for all (equity), forever (sustainability)’ rather than ‘all for some’ - as recommended by the post-1994 core South African water management policies.

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Recommendation

Don’t “other” informal settlement residents in planning for the city’s development.

 

1. There is a need to move away from 'temporary' solutions to services that can be upgraded as settlements are upgraded incrementally. 

2. A long-term goal should be to close the level of service gap between 'formal' and 'informal' settlements

 

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Role and Responsibilities

Researcher - proposing a research plan, identifying case study sites, research participants and conducting all of the field work, data collection and analysis.

 

What I did

During the course of four years, I

• interviewed 46 stakeholders and spoke with many more involved with sanitation services including government and NGO employees, informal settlement residents and leaders and entrepreneurs who were trying to develop innovative solutions;

• visited 17 different settlements across the three cities;

• reviewed settlement services for gaps and took photographs to document conditions; and

• shadowed sanitation workers to understand their working conditions, interactions with users and daily challenges.

 

Process / Approach

I used the ‘snowball method’ for recruiting people for interviews, with one interviewee often leading me to another. Interviews were transcribed and coded thematically according to different dimensions of sustainability and equity that were identified through research and fieldwork. Conceptual mapping and causal loop diagrams were used to look at relationships systemically and to analyze causes and effects.

 

One key obstacle 

Sanitation was and is a politicized topic. Some data that was requested regarding the location and type of existing services became increasingly difficult to obtain. There were also several service delivery protests during the course of the research which made it difficult to safely continue fieldwork in some locations.

 

Outcome

One of the outcomes of my research was a method and framework for assessing equity in sanitation services, which was published in the Journal of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene. The results were also shared directly with research participants.