WPC
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The Community Plumbing Challenge( CPC) was most recently conducted right here in South Africa just a couple of months ago and is a great example of collaboration and partnership, and of how the WPC networks and connections can help bring agencies, municipalities, water authorities, and industry from around the world together to achieve common goals. In July 2016, teams of skilled plumbing professionals and students from Australia, USA, India and South Africa arrived in Diepsloot, north of Johannesburg, to compete in the 2016 Community Plumbing Challenge.
Diepsloot is a crowded, very low-income township. Most Diepsloot residents rely on communal toilets, many of which are inadequate or not operating. Recent studies show that in the parts of Diepsloot where the challenge took place, anywhere between 13 and 45 households share one toilet, tap and drain.
Eight defunct communal toilets were plucked from the ground and then four international student teams collaborated to develop the most effective and sustainable new upgrade solutions, to reinstall and reconnect these communal toilets for local Diepsloot residents.
The CPC is a great template and we are learning from it all the time, not only about what can be achieved, but also how to collaborate, how to partner and how to bring best value to the community from those collaborations.
For the local community it provides a live working example of how to identify, design and install sustainable plumbing solutions. It not only provides education and training opportunities direct to communities, but also helps raise awareness and promote the role of plumbing in providing sustainable solutions.
Underpinning the CPC is a broad and multilayered collaboration between:
• Education and research focused bodies;
• Entities with local water and sanitation management as well as regulatory responsibility; and
• Industry representatives and associations, local and international.
I think the CPC represents the tip of a potential iceberg in terms of what is possible. Collectively we have enormous skill and knowledge, and we are, through programmes like the CPC, learning how to share them with the communities that need it most.
Most importantly, the projects move beyond the demonstrative to leave a lasting improvement for the community that can then be replicated. It is creating a viral approach to plumbing and sanitation improvement. Continued on page 20 >> www. plumbingafrica. co. za February 2017 Volume 22 I Number 12