Aligning governance, technology and budgets is proving essential to deliver water-efficient sanitation that saves money while restoring dignity.

Speaking at a Bremen Overseas Research and Development Association (Borda) event, Dr Zakhele Khuzuwayo, manager: Innovation and Technology, Johannesburg Water, said the sector must “stop working in silos” and align across public, private and academic stakeholders.

City of Johannesburg perspective

JW is a Municipal Owned Entity with CoJ as its sole shareholder. While technically separate, Khuzuwayo says the entities are “intrinsically linked” – when JW succeeds, CoJ succeeds; when JW struggles, the city is seen to share those problems.

He further explains, “Johannesburg Water faces a tough balancing act: delivering services to a growing population with a constrained budget, while also providing free basic water and sanitation to indigent households. Our challenge is not just money, but how we manage it. Every rand saved through technology and innovation is a rand that can stretch further.”

Sanitation pilot projects

This is where technology and innovation come into view, with piloting projects done over several years that pave the way forward. “We are past the pilot stage. Our focus now is embedding water-efficient sanitation solutions (WESS) into the mainstream budget and operations of the city. If a pilot is successful, you don’t stop there — innovation must be integrated into service delivery.”

Khuzuwayo emphasises that leadership and governance are just as critical as technical solutions. Illegal connections, informal settlements, and non-revenue water remain major challenges, and these cannot be solved by engineers alone. “We need the right people in the room – finance officials, municipal leaders, regulators – to make decisions that stick. Engineers can design, but only leadership can align governance, budgets and service delivery.”

Something Dr Khuzumayo points out is that whenever technical workshops and events are taking place, high-level decision makers are absent from the room. JW makes a point of sending senior management to these events because the decision-making power lies with them. “If the problem lies with municipalities, and we want to address all 257 of them, why are only two or three showing up? Water-efficient sanitation solutions (WESS) will die if only two or three municipalities take it seriously.”

WESS

Water-efficient sanitation solutions are a huge priority for JW and CoJ, but it has laboured under a different name before. “When the technology came to focus as Non-Sewered Saniation (NSS), we had a lot of explaining to do, and we lost a lot of ground, because this transformative tech was packaged badly. When we refer to WESS, it’s simple to grasp, and I do believe we lost a lot of mileage to NSS because people understand ‘water’ and ‘efficient’.”

Alternative sanitation and WESS are usually treated as separate from water operations, and Dr Khuzuwayo says, “By separating these, we make innovation seem like a separate thing, but the point of innovation is to aid in the day-to-day. We must, as a starting point, integrate innovation into the daily delivery.”

He explains that this creates a separate market for newer technologies, where there is already money and funding for daily delivery. “If we improve our sanitation through innovation, we need to include innovation in our normal budget.”