# **Water & sanitation**

**Overall assessment.** Overall, South Africa’s performance in access to water lags behind its benchmark upper middle-income group, essentially because of the much lower access in rural areas. This is even more notable with respect to sanitation. In terms of the overall average, the quality of drinking water as measured by the percentage of households using piped or welled water in the aggregate is better than in its benchmark group, but this is because of the very high performance on this indicator in urban areas. (The database does not have information on affordability/pricing). By contrast, rural households score lower than the benchmark and also lower than almost all world regions, including Sub-Saharan Africa. Apparently, while access and quality do not appear to be major problems in urban areas, the performance in these dimensions in rural areas lags seriously behind most comparator groups. This favorable urban picture should also be qualified by the fact that in South Africa, some communities in urban areas, referred to as “peri-urban” areas (e.g., parts of Soweto, Diepsloot etc.) that may or may not belong formally or statistically to their larger urban agglomerations, often lack quantity and quality of basic service, such as water and sanitation (Table 2 and Figures 3-4).

**_Access_** .  Overall access to water is below the benchmark upper middle-income countries, because of the significantly lower access in rural areas.  Specifically, population with access to improved **_water_** is 87%, which is significantly higher than SSA (64%) but lags behind upper middle-income countries (93%). South Africa compares well to the broader group of middleincome countries (both lower and upper middle income) (89%), but is noticeably below high income OECD (99%).  However, looking at the rural/urban differences, rural South Africa (73%) lags far behind the upper middle income rural average (85%), while South African urban areas (98%) do better than other upper middle-income countries (96%). About 67% of the population has access to improved **_sanitation_** , which is almost twice the SSA level and slightly above the world average (64%). However it is still far behind upper middle-income countries (86%) and high-income OECD countries (100%).

**_Quality—technical_** . The percentage of households using piped or welled water as main source of drinking water is 85 for South Africa, which is higher than in upper middle income group (82%), East Asia and Pacific (80%), and SSA (78%), but below both Middle East & North Africa (89%) and South Asia (89%). Once again, however, this figure masks a stark contrast between _urban and rural areas_ .  The share of rural households in South Africa using piped or welled water as main source of drinking water is only 65% compared to 98% for urban areas. Significantly, the rural area percentage for South Africa is _lower_ than the comparable rural household percentages in all the world regions, including SSA (71%), except for East Asia & Pacific and Latin America & the Caribbean which have very similar performance (64% each); the latter is the region that has been documented as having a significant backlog of infrastructure deficiencies that, inter alia, contributed to its low growth (Leipziger, 2001). By contrast, South Africa’s performance on this indicator in urban areas (98%) is the highest (together with South Asia) among all world regions and low and middle income countries.

**_Quality—perception_** _._ At 5.7 out of 7, South Africa gets one of the highest ratings in commercial perception of water service. The rating for high income OECD countries is 5.2 and SSA (4.2). Again, this may represent the view of the satisfaction with service by the segments of the population already enjoying access.  Also, it may reflect the “urban bias” of the perception indicator, and may hide differences between the quality of service in urban versus rural communities (see section on urban-rural divide below).

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