Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene Africa water, Sanitation May-June2015 Vol. 10 No.3 | Page 29

Water Supply

In non-African countries like the United Kingdom,
prepaid water meters are no longer being used after they
were declared illegal in 1998 for public health reasons.
They were also abandoned in South Africa at one
stage following a massive cholera outbreak, but were
reintroduced and have replaced previously free communal
standpipes in rural townships.
Despite U.N. recognition that water is a human right,
international financial institutions such as the World
Bank argue that water should be allocated through market
mechanisms to allow for full cost recovery from users, and
civil society activists like Melusi Khumalo in South Africa
blame capitalist tendencies for necessitating the advent of
prepaid water meters.
“Prepaid water meters are a result of such negative policies
by institutions like the World Bank and they [prepaid
water meters] deny water access to those in most need,”
Khumalo, who is affiliated to Parktown North Residents’
Association in Johannesburg, told this writer.
In Zimbabwe, Mfundo Mlilo, chief executive officer of
Combined Harare Residents’ Association (CHRA), told
IPS: “We are vehemently against the prepaid meter project
because it will not solve the problems of water delivery,
and these prepaid water meters will not lead to residents
receiving adequate safe and clean water, while the same
prepaid water meters will also not lead to increase in
revenue flows as the City [of Harare] claims.”

From page 26
In urban areas - which will continue to grow fast over
coming decades - it is expected that people will halve the
time needed to collect water from 40 to 20 minutes. For
an American or European it may still sound onerous, but
the time saving and health improvement which come
from even something as rudimentary as this would be an
enormous benefit for hundreds of millions of people.
Because we will add an extra billion people to the global
population over the next 15 years, getting water and
sanitation to everyone will require a substantial effort.
However, a team of economists from the World Bank has
estimated that providing sanitation for three billion more
people will cost about 31 billion dollars annually. This is
the cost of providing such low-cost solutions as pour-flush
and dry pit latrines in rural areas and flush toilets to a
septic tank in urban areas, shared by less than 30 people.
Yet, the benefits will amount to 92 billion dollars annually,
about three-quarters of which are time benefits, and
the remaining one-quarter are health benefits (it omits
environmental benefits). This means that every dollar
spent on sanitation will help the world’s most vulnerable
about three dollars, measured in better health and less time
wasted.

Last month, Harare’s Town Clerk Tendai Mahachi was
reported by Zimbabwe’s Weekend Post as saying: “With
these meters we expect roughly to save about 20-30
percent of the current costs we are incurring.”

Providing improved water to an extra 2.3 billion people
will cost 14 billion dollars annually. This does not mean
industrialised world standard of piped water to every
household, but simply providing a protected community
source of water, such as a well, spring and borehole, or
collected rainwater that can be reached within 30 minutes
or less.

According to Mahachi, at least 300 000 households in the
Zimbabwean capital are scheduled to have prepaid water
meters installed, while all new housing projects will be
obliged to install meters.

Yet, again it will create much larger benefits, with less
disease and death and with less wasted time. In all, the
benefits are estimated at 52 billion dollars annually, so that
each dollar spent will generate four dollars of benefits.

Meanwhile, with prepaid water meters set to rake in big
money for some of Africa’s local authorities, there are
those like Nathan Jamela, an urb