and Schools in eThekwini Municipality (Phase 3

WINNER SMEC South Africa for the Provision of Water and Sanitation Services to Informal Settlements and Schools in eThekwini Municipality (Phase 3)

Before 2007, the eThekwini Health Department was tasked with the rolling out of a project aimed at providing communal ablution share blocks to informal settlements, aligning to the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, particularly MDG 7.

With infrastructure delivery not being the Health Department’s core business, service delivery was slow and deemed unacceptable. Thus, in January 2008, eThekwini Water and Sanitation issued a variation order to the existing large-scale AC Water Mains Relay Project to undertake a pilot exercise to efficiently and rapidly address the ablution requirements.

The pilot exercise was a great success and the approach proved to rapidly and effectively address the provision of water and sanitation services to the human settlements concerned.

Subsequently, Phase 2 of the Ablution Programme commenced in 2012 on a larger scale, followed by Phase 3, which is currently under way, having commenced in August 2015.

The Sanitation Phase 3 project directly addresses the need to remedy the severely adverse conditions experienced by the inhabitants of numerous informal settlements within eThekwini Municipality through the provision of basic water and sanitation facilities and in turn servicing

basic human needs. This is demonstrated through the delivery of over 430 communal ablution facilities to over 34 informal settlements, serving more than 118 000 people across the city.

The overall project budget exceeded R1.7 billion and continued over a four-anda-half-year period. The project was geared towards contributing to the municipality’s social and economic agenda and demonstrated this successfully through the inclusion of labour-intensive construction methods and thereby the provision of economic opportunities for the local community.

This also included the recruitment of community members for supervision of

PROJECT TEAM Client: eThekwini Municipality, Water and Sanitation Unit Consulting engineer: SMEC South Africa

the facilities once completed. Only local suppliers and local labourers within the affected communities were used, as far as possible, across all functions throughout the implementation of the project.

In totality, the project comprised the programme management and overall programme governance and control for Phase 3 of the sanitation programme over a period of four years. The project team consisted of more than 50 companies, including a substantial entity development component in both construction and design aspects, thus contributing to eThekwini Municipality and national government’s drive towards radical economic transformation.