Let’s be realistic about accelerating change

While the World Water Day theme – ‘Accelerating Change’ – is needed to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 6 (SDG 6), the water sector is currently in survival mode.

By Dan Naidoo, chairman, WISA

Professionals in the water sector must be multitaskers. While we focus on providing water and sanitation services in a very difficult environment –grappling with systemic issues like loadshedding, vandalism and municipal governance – we cannot forget about SDG 6. But it is difficult to make progress with the challenges we face.

Water and energy are joined at the hip. The energy crisis has propelled the water sector into crisis. Water and sanitation providers are currently focused on sustaining operations during power outages. Investment that should be directed towards SDG 6 is now going towards energy requirements during power outages. We cannot simply put SDG 6 on the back burner, but we need to acknowledge that significant resources in terms of funding, skills and time have been redirected towards operations to cope with load-shedding.

And sanitation

Historically, water has dominated the discussion, and sanitation has been given a backseat. Progress on sanitation, the poor cousin to water services management, is severely lagging. Poor sanitation leads to the contamination of water sources, food and living spaces, with harmful pathogens, parasites and other disease-causing organisms. Sanitation must be prioritised. The sector is still water provision/project biased. Resources need to be equitably distributed between water and sanitation. Before any acceleration occurs, we need to make an equal commitment to achieving the sanitation components of SDG 6. Despite the available sanitation technologies, there is very little uptake. Even though water is a limited resource, we are still favouring toilets that flush copious amounts of potable water down the drain every day. There are far more water projects in progress at any point in time than sanitation projects, and yet sanitation has a direct impact on water quality and the quality of life.

According to the UN, 2.2 billion people lack access to safe drinking water, and 4.2 billion people lack access to safely managed sanitation services. In a country with a history of inequality, SDG 6 has huge significance. But in accelerating change towards achieving this goal, we need to mitigate the impact of load-shedding on our sector and prioritise sanitation commitments in parallel with equal vigour.