The pandemic and Africa’s water industry

Water usage patterns have changed all round the world due to populations in lockdown spending more time at home.

By Dr Jo Burgess*

The morning ablution peak has shifted to late morning, and domestic water consumption has increased by 15% to 25%, while non-domestic has decreased by 30% to 50%. In Africa, this is a critical issue because there are fewer domestic customers on metered water connections than elsewhere in the world, which means that a much higher proportion of the water that water service providers are supplying is not being paid for. The result is depressed revenue at exactly the time when utilities desperately need income to extend water and sanitation services to unserved communities.

Covid-19 response challenges

Africa has issues of managing Covid-19 in communities that do not have access to running water, and do not have the ability to self-isolate. Consider the minimum requirements for a lockdown to be effective: access to safe drinking water in the home; access to adequate sanitation in the home; a source of reliable energy; access to information or communications technology; and having a permanent source of income or savings.

If the first three requirements are not met, then almost all household members will need to make multiple daily trips to places where other people congregate, such as communal taps and communal ablution blocks (CABs). Seemingly simple steps to battle the spread of Covid-19, like regularly washing hands with soap and water, present fundamental challenges.

While facing the global issues of sourcing personal protective equipment, social distancing and operating with a scaled-back workforce, the African water industry has mobilised to assist the poorest customers, both domestic and commercial, with access to a supply of safe water. In South Africa, organisations have banded together to provide resources like multilingual advice for people using CABs. The Department of Human Settlements, Water and Sanitation has procured 41 000 water tanks and is providing them to small or rural municipalities to enable them to supply potable water to unserved communities.

Most utilities, for example in Ghana, South Africa, Malawi and Uganda, are supporting the vulnerable and are trying to remobilise their capital programmes. Research-wise, the monitoring of genetic material from the inactive virus found in sewerage systems could provide a rapid early detection method to identify its presence in communities and lead to targeted lockdowns. This approach, often termed wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE), has some potential advantages over case-by-case tracking, including improved throughput at the community level and tracking asymptomatic cases.

This is a hot research topic right now, with universities, utilities and research centres in Australia, Egypt, France, Mexico, the Netherlands, South Africa, the UK, the USA and others collaborating in the race against time to develop a reliable WBE programme. It is critical to note that these detections do not represent a culturable virus in the wastewater that would be necessary to cause infection. Separate research is being conducted to assess the presence and persistence of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), which causes Covid-19 disease, in wastewater and any disinfection required.

A WhatsApp group intended for a handful of utilities to share learnings and experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic has quickly scaled to involve over 260 organisations. Dr Piers Clark, founder and chairman of Isle Utilities, started the chat group in March when lockdowns required utilities to respond rapidly to multiple unprecedented challenges.

The group includes 41 African organisations – 21 municipalities, 17 water boards and water and sewerage companies, two water service provider associations, and a national water authority – from eight countries, with 68 individual members. To help curate the rich stream of information shared in the WhatsApp group, Clark hosts a weekly webinar on Thursdays at 08:30 and 17:30 (SAST) to accommodate global time differences.

Clark says issues on the technical side have been around the contamination and reuse of personal protective equipment, asset management and the impact of changes in demand on models for water network management. More recently, people are asking about modelling of the financial impacts on organisations and changes in the way rates are charged and collected.

“Covid-19 is affecting everyone, and if ever there was a time for collaboration, this is it. The ability to communicate between colleagues within utilities has always been quite good, but what we are seeing now is that walls between utilities have crumbled,” says Clark.

*Dr Jo Burgess is a technical consultant at Isle Utilities.