· Addressing backlogs in water and sanitation provision in our AOS and beyond;

· Working with DWAF in trying to help improve water and sanitation services to our municipalities; and

· Working directly with municipalities to improve water and sanitation service delivery.

Notwithstanding the current success we have achieved with respect to our core business - i.e. the provision of bulk potable (drinking) water to about 12 million people in our AOS, we have challenges with helping extend services to unserved areas, with working directly with municipalities and with working with DWAF in trying to improve water and sanitation services to municipalities.

The purpose of this presentation is to inform the Portfolio Committee of Rand Water's attempts to improve the access to water and sanitation services and to offer certain practical recommendations to the Portfolio Committee in order to seek the assistance of the Committee in helping Rand Water and South Africa extend water and sanitation services to a greater majority of our people and thereby exceed the MDGs.

2. ADDRESSING BACKLOGS IN AND BEYOND OUR AREA OF SERVICE

Rand Water has embarked on an ambitious programme, which has as its objectives the following:

· Understand the inadequacy of water service provision in clearly defined areas within and in areas that are in close proximity to its AOS. This means obtaining data on the following:

• Population numbers, household sizes, personal income profile, employment status - all derived from the national census data
• Status quo access to water and sanitation in terms of set norms
• Municipal ability to extend coverage
• Bulk infrastructure availability

• Growth projections - population growth and demand growth
• Assessment of Rand Water's current capacity to provide bulk services -total Mild - without any new infrastmcture expansion

Once this information has been collected and analysed, then Rand Water would have a scientific basis for making practical proposals on how it could, in the medium term - i.e. over the next 34 years - extend the coverage of water and sanitation services to all people within and in areas that are within close proximity to our AOS.

Notwithstanding the fact that the study is not yet completed, we have been able to identify certain key intervention areas. These are:

• There are about 1 million people that are in close proximity to our AOS who do not have adequate access to water and sanitation. Some of these areas are:

• Winterveldt and its adjacent villages - 600,000 people
• Delmas - about 50,000 people
• Western Highveld Region - about 350,000 people
• Balfour district - about 35,000 people
• Eastem Free State - about 40,000 people

• Rand Water has sufficient purification capacity to meet this need.
• Rand Water is currently providing part funding to extend its distribution infrastructure to the Western Highveld Region.

Subject to approval by the Municipalities and DWAF, Rand Water needs an amount of about R900,000,000 (R900 million) to extend the its distribution infrastructure to the other areas mention above in order to ensure that people in these areas have adequate access to water services. In order for this to become a reality within the next 3-4 years, National Treasury, DWAF and DPLC will have to come together to see how best the funding required can be accessed so that we exceed the MDGs and achieve the vision of our President.

A final report on Rand Water's vision for greater access to water services is expected to be completed by June 2006, after which we would appreciate an opportunity to brief the Portfolio Committee on the attainment of this vision.

3. WORKING WITH DWAF TO EXTEND SANITATION SERVICES TO MUNICIPALITIES

Since 2001 Rand Water has been actively engaged in working with municipalities in order to help them comply with environmental standards for sewerage effluent discharges. Most of the municipalities within our AOS do not comply with environmental standards. The net result is that in most cases raw sewerage is being discharged directly into the environment. Some examples are Emalahleni, Maluti-a-Phofung, Govan Mbeki, Emfuleni, Midvaal, Randfontein, Westonarea, Merafong, Kungwini and Parys. The common problems associated with these municipalities are sub-standard effluent quality, plant capacity and poor condition of treatment facilities, and little capacity to handle and dispose of sewerage. What is needed is an assessment of the treatment works at these municipalities in order to finalise a plan of action to fix up their treatment works to enable them to put an end to the environmental pollution. The total cost for undertaking this assessment is R2m.

Of the municipalities we approached, only Midvaal and Randfontein accepted our assistance and have since seen a significant improvement in the operation of their treatment works, in the compliance of their effluent and in the training of their staff.

Emfuleni has signed an interim services contract with Rand Water which enables the municipality to call on Rand Water in times of need to provide specific assistance.

All of the other municipalities either do not have the funding to help them comply or have stated that they do not require any assistance.

The key implication of municipalities discharging raw and untreated sewerage into the environment is that it directly deteriorates the quality of our raw water sources. In our AOS a deteriorated raw water supply has the immediate effect of increasing the costs of purification, thereby making the end price of drinking water to our consumers more expensive. It is therefore of direct interest to both affordability of, and accessibility to water services, that we ensure that municipalities adhere to effluent discharge standards.

From all our municipal interactions, all municipalities acknowledge the problems that they have, but state that due to an unavailability of funding, they are unable to address the problems of environmental pollution.

In the light is the lack of funding, Rand Water turned to DWAF for assistance. DWAF's response was for us to discuss it with the Municipalities, as they are the Water Service Authorities. This puts us back to square one: municipalities simply do not have the money to adequately address the problem.

From this brief exposition, it is apparent that the financial transfers I grants that National Government makes available to municipalities for water and sanitation services is inadequate. In the absence of adequate funding, not only will the cost of water become excessive and unaffordable, the need of addressing proper sanitation will be left neglected, thereby mitigating against South Africa achieving the MDGs.

4. WORKING DIRECTLY WITH MUNICIPALITIES TO IMPROVE ACCESS TO WATER AND SANITATION

One of the critical deficiencies that municipalities in general experience is the shortage of skills. In recognition of this, Rand Water has over the past few years approached Municipalities to offer assistance in this regard. The Municipalities of Tshwane, Maluti-a-Phofung and Madibeng have accepted our assistance in the area of providing water and sanitation to end users. To date, some of the successes that we have notched up are:

• Reduction in unaccounted for water

• Odi - from 48% to 29%
• Maluthi-a-Phofung -from 23% to 18% lmprovement in service levels

• Implementation of upgrading and refurbishment projects:
• Tshwane - R34m
• Madibeng - R2m
• Emfuleni - Rl2m

• Increase accessibility

• Odi from 29,000 to 65,500 households. This translates to 327,000
• people lmprove Payment Levels
• Mabopane & GaRankuwa - from 66% to 80%
• Harrismith - from 71% to 77%

• Reduce un-paid for water volumes

• Odi Informal Villages - from 42 to 12 kl/hh/mth
• Urban areas - from 36 to 17 kl/hh/mth

Notwithstanding these successes, municipalities are not taking advantage of the provisions in Municipal legislation to appoint organs of state (such as Rand Water) to help them improve access to water and sanitation. A good example is Rustenburg .Rustenburg has a serious problem with unaccounted for water In recognition of Rand Water's expertise in this field, Rustenburg invited us to make a presentation of how we could be of assistance to them. Not long after our presentation, the municipality used our presentation and invited consultants from the open market to tender for the work. This happened a year ago, and to date nothing has been implemented to enable them to reduce their unaccounted for water.

5. CONCLUSIONS

From the foregoing exposition it is clear that South Africa has a critical challenge of extending adequate levels of water services to all of its people. Rand Water believes that this challenge can be easily addressed over the short to medium term. Clearly there are obstacles - the key obstacle from our experience relates to the following:

· Municipalities are responsible for the delivery of water services to communities. The problem is that they do not seem to be held accountable. Little is being done to rectify specific areas of non-delivery, lack of capacity and a lack of funding. Municipalities need to be held accountable for non-delivery. A good example here is Delmas. Rand Water is of the view that the recent outbreak of typhoid could have been averted. Water service providers cannot and should never be allowed to supply water to people without being able to test its compliance to quality standards. This situation has left us concerned as to who is responsible to monitor municipalities in terms of their ability to provide quality assurance to the communities they serve? Is there a consequence for letting communities suffer unnecessarily?

Immediately on hearing of the outbreak, Rand Water immediately transported fresh water into the area for a period of 4 days in order to ensure that the children and elderly had access to fresh water. In addition we provided the municipality with two proposals. One to extend our distribution network into their area. We are awaiting a decision on that from the Delmas Municipality. The second proposal was to help the municipality develop a process and quality management framework to ensure that a repeat of the outbreak is never repeated. We specifically informed the municipality that this will be done free of charge to themselves. Notwithstanding their acknowledgement of this offer, they have not as yet acted on it. On enquiring why this is the case, we were informed that they do not have the capacity to deal with this matter! Can we afford to lose more lives due to a lack of capacity? Why are we allowing this to continue?

· The legislative framework within which we operate is another obstacle. The recent conferring the status of Water Service Authorities on municipalities has had unintended consequences. Municipalities have in general used this authority status to look at the provision of water services in a very selfish manner, thereby ignoring regional provision and regional efficiencies. A good example is the Western Highveld Region. The current infrastructure in the area is of a regional nature. In other words, the infrastructure is meant to equitably supply water to the region, ensuring that all people get access to water. Notwithstanding this, the individual municipalities in the region have convinced DWAF, by virtue of their water service authority status, to carve up this regional infrastructure and transfer them to the individual municipalities. Clearly, such action will work against the sustainable and equitable provision of water to the region. The real danger is that access to water will be severely impacted on. The current extension by Rand Water of bulk infrastructure into the region will serve little purpose if this dismantling of regional infrastructure is left to continue as it is. Even DWAF appears powerless to intervene and stop this ill-informed transfer of assets. The legislative framework has enabled it to continue.

Authority without accountability and responsibility can never be good for improved service delivery.