SA making progress towards achieving SDG6 on water and sanitation

SA making progress towards achieving SDG6 on water and sanitation

On 22 March, the world will mark World Water Day. The day is aimed at encouraging efforts to accelerate change to solve the water and sanitation crisis across the globe. This year’s global campaign is “Be the change”, and it encourages everyone to take action in their lives to change how they use, consume and manage water.

Delivering his Budget Speech in February, Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana said climate change poses considerable risks and constraints to sustainable economic growth in South Africa and recent events have shown that extreme weather events such as floods, heatwaves and drought are occurring more often.

It’s a well-known fact that South Africa is a water-scarce country and loadshedding amongst other challenges also adds to the pressure.

In the Western Cape, the City of Cape Town has said that loadshedding is having an impact on water supply operations in Cape Town, notably in higher-lying areas where water needs to be pumped to get to properties.

The City urged residents to play their part in reducing water usage so the City can maintain the supply during prolonged high stages of loadshedding and reduce the collective water use to 850 million litres per day.

Acting Mayoral Committee Member for Water and Sanitation, Councillor Siseko Mbandezi, said the reservoirs are not able to fill up “fast enough because of the prolonged period of load-shedding.”

“Using less water will help deal with operational challenges, notably due to heavy load-shedding, which are impacting on our water treatment plants and ability to convey good quality drinking water to reservoirs and areas across Cape Town, especially to high-lying areas where the water has to be pumped.

‘While City teams are monitoring the water supply operations and usage very closely and doing all they can to maintain supply, we also need our residents to help us during this time by using less water,’ he said.

Meanwhile, the Deputy Minister of Water and Sanitation, Ms Dikeledi Magadzi, has expressed confidence in the work being carried out by the department, along with key several stakeholders in the sector towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG6) on water and sanitation.

Deputy Minister Magadzi was delivering a keynote address during a two-day Midterm Review workshop on the Sustainable Development Goals in Pretoria on 22- 23 February 2023.

She told the delegates that, through the country’s National Water & Sanitation Master Plan and the National Water Resource Strategy in particular, South Africa has developed arguably the most effective operational structure for the implementation of SDG6 on the African continent.

“The National Water & Sanitation Master Plan and the National Water Resource Strategy are logical designs that include experts that cover all the different disciplines required to achieve Target and Indicator objectives and implemented with a systematic approach that identifies respective gaps and offers interventions to closing those gaps,” the Deputy Minister said.

Magadzi went on to say that there is still much more to be done and urged sector role players to work collaboratively with the Department towards successfully attaining SDG6 by 2030 and beyond.

Using less water will help deal with operational challenges, notably due to heavy load-shedding

“The SDG6 is a sector programme and not just a programme of the Department, and without the right commitment, investment, delivery, and performance of all sector role players, then South Africa will not be where it should be by 2030. It is for this reason that we should work closely and collaboratively going forward,” she said.

“In this SDG6 programme, we can either win together or we can lose together, and for the Department of Water and Sanitation, and the sector in its entirety, the latter cannot be an option,” she said.

She added that some of the tangible progress made towards attaining SDGs include the implementation of a National Groundwater Monitoring Programme which is the feeder to the assessment of SDG targets/ indicators as far as groundwater quality is concerned.

“The Department recognises the significance of water conservation and demand management and its contribution towards water use efficiency. By minimising non-revenue water such as high leakages, it removes the burden and capital expenditure of new infrastructure requirements,” she added.