Water Wheel Sept/Oct 2022: Women In Sanitation

Abstract

Celebrating South Africa’s women in sanitation – working hard to provide dignity to all Worldwide, big cities traditionally rely on centralised wastewater works and labyrinthine sewers to meet their citizens’ toilet-time needs. This big-ticket infrastructure provides for flush-toilets, long prized as the ‘gold standard’ in sanitation. The trouble is that cities are growing and the pipes cannot keep pace. More to the point, municipalities often lack the cash and the capacity to put them in or to keep them maintained. In the case of Durban, city finances have been stretched by a COVID-induced economic downturn, last year’s July riots and the floods earlier this year (which also swamped treatment plants). To this catalogue of woe must be added water scarcity and the likelihood that climate change will make matters worse. Prof Cathy Sutherland, an urban geographer at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, suggests: if the city is to honour citizens’ constitutional right to basic sanitation, it must start to do things differently.

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