The Department of Water and Sanitation is committed to eradicating the bucket toilet system, it said on Friday.

“The Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS) knows and accepts that access to dignified sanitation is a basic human right,” the department said in a statement.

The department’s spokesman Sputnik Ratau added: “In this regard the DWS has two sanitation grants that seek to eradicate the sanitation backlog in the country, namely the Rural Household Infrastructure Grant (RHIG) and the Bucket Eradication Grant”.

Ratau said the DWS would focus on households still making use of the bucket toilet system in formal areas and replacing this system with waterborne sanitation by December of 2015.

“The department is also developing an implementation plan that will address the informal areas in the next financial year: 2016/17.”

He added: “In the rural areas the programme attends to formalised areas/villages. Municipalities continue with their responsibilities for water and sanitation needs of informal areas until such time as the plan for the formalisation of the areas or resettlement of such areas is confirmed.”

Provinces with the highest sanitation backlogs are the Free State, Eastern Cape, Limpopo, KwaZulu-Natal and the Northern Cape. The estimated cost for the eradication of the general sanitation backlog is R50 billion.

–ANA