Water, Sewage & Effluent January February 2019 | Page 40

Reliability is crucial to water’s
Sustainable Development Goals
Theewaterskloof Dam in the Western Cape in April 2018.
How is the reliability of
water supply defined,
and where exactly do
we stand?
By Mike Muller
A
sk residents of Cape Town,
Rustenburg, or Hammanskraal
in Tshwane if they are satisfied
with their water supply and you
are likely to get a rude answer. And if you
ask people in many rural parts of South
Africa, you may be met with a blank
stare. They may then explain that it has
been a long time since water came out
of the taps.
It was easy for world leaders
to agree in 2015 that they would
“Ensure availability and sustainable
management of water and sanitation
for all”. All 193 member states of the
40
United Nations were happy to agree.
Their commitment was part of an even
more ambitious programme — the 2030
Agenda for Sustainable Development
— which planned to “end poverty in all
its forms” and to ensure that “no one
will be left behind”.
After
the
photographs
and
congratulations in New York, the
politicians left a trail of international
experts puzzling over the implications
of this grand declaration. The UN’s 2030
Agenda for Sustainable Development
set 169 targets (including eight for
water) for the achievement of the 17 big
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The challenge was then to explain
what those targets actually meant and
how they would be measured so that
governments could translate them into
workable programmes.
The first target of SDG6, the water
goal, looked straightforward: Target 6.1:
Achieve access to safe and affordable
drinking water. But what does ‘access’
mean? How do we ensure that water
is ‘safe’? And how can water be made
Water Sewage & Effluent January/February 2019
‘affordable’ to the very poor? In 2015,
the UN had reported that there were
844 million people without even a basic
water service. A further 2.1 billion people
did not have water available when
needed and free from contamination
or, as they termed it, ‘safely managed
drinking water’.
They agreed that, to monitor the
achievement of ‘safely managed
water’, the focus would be on reliability
of supply as well as on the quality of
the water.
That immediately put South Africa on
the spot. We had easily complied with the
UN’s previous Millennium Development
Goal for water which was to halve, by
2015, the proportion of people without
access to safe drinking water. That
was because ‘access’ was measured
in terms of infrastructure. If there were
pipes in the ground connected to a
treatment works or other safe source,
it was assumed that people had access.
The reality of course is different. Huge
sums have been spent on infrastructure.
But, as is regularly reported in local
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