To what extent does socio-economic status still affect household access to water and sanitation services in South Africa?

Bruce Rhodes,Tamlyn Mckenzie

doi:10.4102/jef.v11i1.173

Abstract

It is publically acknowledged that South Africa has recently met its millennium development goal of halving water and sanitation services (WSS) backlogs. However, significant deficits remain, especially in the case of sanitation. These shortfalls are unevenly distributed across provinces and can be tracked by socio-economic status. This article seeks to examine and identify the socio-economic factors that may affect poor WSS provision in South Africa. Using the 2014 South African General Household Survey, socio-economic indicators and access to WSS were analysed. Descriptive statistics and multivariate analysis indicate that access to WSS is largely determined by province, race and geographical location. It appears that higher quality levels of sanitation are less accessible relative to piped water access. Identifying these socio-economic factors affecting WSS provides obvious policy direction and better-targeted water infrastructural development.

Highlights

In 1994, the new democratic government faced massive regional and racial differences with regard to adequate water and sanitation services (WSS) (Department of Environmental Affairs 2012)
The question in the General Household Survey (GHS) pertaining to piped water asks for households to identify their main source of drinking water
There has been considerable progress since 1994 in achieving WSS development, consistent with previous studies, results show that progress in the domain of piped drinking water is more advanced than sanitation

Summary

Introduction

In 1994, the new democratic government faced massive regional and racial differences with regard to adequate water and sanitation services (WSS) (Department of Environmental Affairs 2012). To provide full universal access by 2015, it was estimated that the government would need to spend the equivalent of US $857 million per annum and $1.21 billion per annum as the required investment to meet the total backlog of upgrading water supply services and sanitation facilities, respectively, including all the informal settlements in association with the housing programme (World Bank 2011). In South Africa, there is little recent work on identifying the socio-economic characteristics of households that access piped water and even less on the equivalent analysis for sanitation over the same sample. The section ‘Data and methods’ details the chosen methodology of investigation and econometric specification followed by results in the section ‘Results’ and a concluding discussion in the section ‘Discussion’

Background

Results

Discussion