South Africa

While digital tools and services present an opportunity to address some of the critical challenges facing food and water systems, concerns remain over large groups of people, such as women, elderly people, or people with little formal education, who may be excluded from the development, use, and benefit of digital innovation. In this report we present the outcome of a study that was conducted to assess whether a digital innovation that provides an irrigation service in many African countries was socially inclusive. The assessment was done with the multi-dimensional digital inclusivity index, a tool that is being developed for assessing digital inclusiveness across various dimensions in food, land, and water systems.

The Limpopo River Basin Digital Twin Ideation and Co-design Workshop was conducted with the purpose of generating innovative ideas and collaboratively designing a Digital Twin platform tailored to the water resource management needs of the Limpopo Basin, ensuring that the design reflected the diverse user needs and data requirements across the basin. ; Purpose: The workshop aimed to generate innovative ideas and collaboratively design a Digital Twin platform for water resource management in the Limpopo Basin. The workshop engaged 18 stakeholders and water resource specialists representing the Limpopo Watercourse Commission (LIMCOM) and four countries – Mozambique, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and South Africa – together with the IWMI project team and GWPSA, to ensure the design reflected user needs and data requirements. ; Context: The workshop took place on May 7th, 2024, in Pretoria, South Africa, following a day of GWPSA led discussions with LIMCOM and the GEF Small Grants Programme (UNDP-GEF) regarding the data needs for managing water resources as part of the development of the Limpopo Management Information System (LIMIS). ; Key Results: Stakeholders reinforced their commitment to adopt the Digital Twin as an additional tool for managing water resources. The workshop allowed the participants to outline the critical data needs, identify new target users for the platform, explore potential use cases for solving existing user needs, and generate innovative ideas for the project. Prioritization of data requirements, management actions, and future developments based on generated ideas were key outcomes.

South Africa’s Integrated Development Plan (IDP) and Water Services Development Plan (WSDP) processes provide a legally binding framework, or so-called ‘long route to accountability’, in which citizens can hold their elected political representatives accountable. This includes municipalities’ prioritization and allocation of available internal and external financial, technical and institutional resources for service delivery, and the appointment of internal or external service providers to that end. On the ground, communities interact directly with these service providers in a short route to accountability. However, when it comes to participation for improved water services, communities in low-income rural and urban areas seem inactive. Instead, they protest on the streets. Addressing this void, the Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS) started establishing and supporting Water and Sanitation Community Forums (WSCFs). In collaboration with DWS and eight WSCFs, and supported by the Water Research Commission (WRC), the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) implemented the project ‘Institutionalizing inclusive community-led planning of water supply in IDP and WSDP’. The project examined the stumbling blocks in the implementation of this long route to accountability or in other institutional issues that seem to ignore ordinary community members in under-resourced settings. This evidence is the basis for recommendations to revive the IDP and active participation in the water sector. The project has two main outputs. The user-friendly “Guidelines for Water and Sanitation Community Forums, municipal officials, and other decision-makers to integrate participatory planning into Integrated Development Plan and Water Services Development Plan processes” synthesize the experiences and aspirations of the WSCFs, as emerged from direct and mutual engagements and dialogues. The present report combines these experiences with extensive literature review on the South African context, disentangling public water services delivery according to the World Bank’s long and short routes to accountability. Our analysis suggests main obstacles in the first leg of the long route to accountability, in which communities express their problems and priorities in the IDP processes via the wards up to the mayor of the Water Services Authority. Voices about specific water issues are quite technical and get lost amidst of many other needs. Even if communities communicate acute problems of lack of maintenance and breakdowns of municipal infrastructure, response is slow or absent. Further, officials tend to focus on municipal systems only. Yet, where municipal water services fail or haven’t been implemented as yet, communities find alternatives. Communities already take over some operation and maintenance of municipal systems and are keen to formalise. Communities also participate actively from the planning phase onwards in small systems by NGOs, donors, or private sector,

South Africa’s legally binding National Water Resource Strategy specifies a people-oriented prioritization for the equitable allocation of the nation’s public trust of surface and groundwater resources. This article analyses how the Inkomati–Usuthu Catchment Management Agency seeks to operationalize the three highest priorities in the Sabie Sub Catchment: the Basic Human Needs Reserve for domestic and constitutionally based productive water uses; customary water tenure in former homelands prioritized over the upstream commercial forestry and large-scale farming and the downstream Kruger National Park; and priority General Authorizations overcoming administrative injustices of current licensing. These highest priorities imply curtailment of the lowest priority, high-impact economic uses.