MIKE'S MESSAGE
19
It is people who
make technology
work – or fail
By Mike Muller
As I warned readers earlier this year, we are going to be talking
a lot about water conservation and demand management over
the next few years.
And it is going to be a crowded field. A recent two-
day workshop on the subject at the Development
Bank of South Africa (DBSA) in Midrand was well
attended. The following week, a similar meeting in
the Western Cape had even more participants —
for obvious reasons.
Numerous bright ideas are floating around. But I am
afraid that too many of them cannot help to address
our current challenges. Many involve innovations that
will have little immediate effect. Meanwhile, technology
fixes aiming for immediate impact are also often
unlikely to work.
So, one bright idea came from the World Economic
Forum, which regards itself as a global thought leader in
everything from world peace to better diets. Its report on
the Fourth Industrial Revolution (they think big) suggested
that “water could also transition from centralised
networks towards more distributed systems”.
This is simply copying from electricity. It has been
proposed that small local generators (wind, solar,
and even nuclear) could indeed one day replace the
current system of massive generators connecting to
distant consumers over long transmission lines. It might
work in electricity — although I have my doubts. In
our business though, the difficulty is that you cannot
generate water. In most cities, particularly in South
Africa, water is brought from far away because there is
simply not enough locally.
The technology salvation story continues at household
level. Will a water-saving app on your smartphone that
tells you not to leave the tap running while you brush
your teeth make a noticeable difference to a city’s water
www.plumbingafrica.co.za
supply? Just ask yourself: (1) how many people are likely
to use it; and (2) even if they do, will they continue doing
things differently into the future? It is that last point that
is important.
My friends at the Water Research Commission (WRC), to
which all water users pay over R100-million a year, often
lament that they have developed many new technologies
that no one is using. They do not acknowledge that
these technologies — water treatment provides many
examples — are often no better or cheaper than the
proliferation of options already available on the market.
Mike Muller
Mike Muller is a visiting
adjunct professor at the
Wits University School
of Governance and a
former Commissioner
of the National Planning
Commission and Director
General of Water Affairs.
The WRC has also supported some very practical
innovations, like low-flush toilets. These too are
not spreading as fast as they would like. But that is
predictable. People do not fit new toilets just to save
water. They do so when they build a new house or
renovate a bathroom — that does not happen very often.
But if government specifies that low-flush units must be
used (and stops suppliers from selling anything else), the
volume of water used to flush the country’s toilets will
reduce over time.
In the meantime, the big challenge is to change people’s
behaviour. At the Western Cape meeting, the inventor of a
clever remote metering system for schools acknowledged
that the biggest water saving his programme had made
was simply to turn off school taps that were still running
at the end of the day.
So, my suggestion to the WRC is that, instead of
moaning that people do not use their products, they
need to do more work on how to change people’s
behaviour. We will measure their success by the results,
not the complaints! PA
In the meantime,
the big challenge
is to change
people’s
behaviour.
October 2017 Volume 23 I Number 8