South Africa is facing a sanitation crisis aggravated by rapid urbanisation, a world toilet summit has heard.

The chairwoman of Parliament’s human settlements portfolio committee, Beauty Dambuza, said last Tuesday there were huge disparities between urban and rural sanitation services. For example, 90% of households had access to sanitation facilities in the Western Cape compared with only 7% in Limpopo.

According to a report titled The Quality of Sanitation in South Africa, tabled in Parliament two months ago, the government needed to invest R44.5 billion in order to solve South Africa’s sanitation crisis.

Of South Africa’s households, 1.4 million or about 11% have no sanitation facilities or services. Municipalities, which are primarily responsible for these services, were not spending their capital allocations on sanitation services.

Twenty-six percent of households were at the mercy of sanitation infrastructure that was on the brink of collapse.

World Toilet Organisation chairman Jack Sim said at the summit in Durban that proper sanitation, hygiene and hand washing could potentially cut half the disease burden in developing countries. A lack of proper sanitation facilities among low income groups had a host of negative effects including lower attendance at schools, poorer health and higher child morbidity rates, he said.

Dambuza said South Africa had made good strides in water provision in the past decade, but much less progress had been made on adequate sanitation.

Sanitation should not only be viewed as providing a toilet, but should be linked to the collection and disposal of all waste within communities, she said.

Deputy Human Settlements Minister Zou Kota-Fredericks said the difficulties experienced by municipalities in providing adequate services resulted from the mushrooming of informal settlements due to the global phenomenon of urbanisation.

Kota-Fredericks commended a scheme rolled out by the eThekwini Municipality to informal settlements around Durban. The municipality had installed converted containers that provided toilet, shower and wash facilities separately for men and women.

Kota-Fredericks said among the reasons recently identified by a ministerial task team for the slow provision of sanitation were a lack of co-ordination between spheres of government, weak institutional capacity, and large increases in households, informal settlements and backyard dwellings since 2001. She said the provision of sanitation services to areas that needed them had been identified by the Presidential Infrastructure Co-ordinating Commission as a priority.

Sim said in spite of many initiatives by government ministries and nongovernmental organisations to tackle the issue of African sanitation, they had not been extensive enough.

Source: BDLive