Business Report: Provinces push ahead in major service provision

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Provinces push ahead in major service provision
August 5, 2008

By Donwald Pressly

Cape Town – Electricity provision has reached 81 percent of the country’ households, up from 76 percent a few years ago, according to the Local Government Research Centre. The centre cites this figure as proof that the provinces are making progress in providing households with major services.

The centre, headed by Clive Keegan, monitored the latest general household survey released by Statistics SA. It noted that the only unfavourable indicator was the growth in the number of informal settlements in just about all provinces.

While the survey showed clear progress, especially in the provision of water and sanitation, Keegan said the speed of urbanisation accounted for the growing figures for shacks.

In Gauteng, about 26 percent of households now live in shacks, compared with 18.7 percent in 2002. In the Western Cape, slightly more than 21 percent live in shacks, compared with 15 percent in 2002.

However, the Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and Limpopo have bucked the trend. In 2002 in the Eastern Cape, about 9.4 percent lived in shacks, dropping to 8.3 percent last year. The figure dropped from 11.4 percent to 8.4 percent in KwaZulu-Natal and from 5 percent to 4.4 percent in Limpopo.

The national average rose from 12.7 percent to 15.4 percent.

The survey, conducted last year, indicates that Eastern Cape is the province with the lowest electrification level – 70 percent of households. However, this is an improvement from 54.6 percent in 2002.

The increase in power connections has translated into a decline in the use of paraffin and wood for cooking, from about 38 percent of households to less than 30 percent.

However, rapid urbanisation to Gauteng – and mushrooming shack settlement – set the province against the national trend: households using paraffin and wood for cooking rose from 13.6 percent to 18.5 percent.

On the positive side, only 1.8 percent of households nationally still use the bucket system, down from 2.3 percent in 2002. The provinces furthest behind in providing sanitation facilities are the Free State, with 12.4 percent using the bucket system, the Eastern Cape with 4.7 percent and the Northern Cape with 3.7 percent.

In eight provinces the percentage of households with no toilet facility – using the bucket system instead – had declined.

In Gauteng this proportion dropped from 1.8 percent to 1.3 percent; in the Western Cape from 5.7 percent to 4.1 percent. Only in the North West did the figure increase, from 7 percent to 7.5 percent.

Keegan noted that although the percentage of households that used safe offsite water sources – a neighbour’s tap, a communal tap or an offsite borehole – had increased from 17.9 percent to 22 percent, this shift reflected a drop in the use of unsafe sources.

In spite of this improvement, there were still big differences between population groups, he said: nearly 28 percent of black Africans had to use offsite safe water sources, compared with only 2.2 percent of other population groups.