Towards context specific water solutions for resilient and sustainable communities: Unconventional water delivery approaches

Abstract

Since 1994, the South African government has focused on eradicating service delivery backlogs, and this has largely been done through the deployment of conventional solutions. However, many rural communities continue to be marginalised as most conventional solutions are expensive to implement due to the settlement characteristics of such communities. Thus, this call for a new focus on context specific solutions targeted at areas that are hard to reach with conventional systems. This paper seeks to showcase the success in the deployment of unconventional solutions in yielding promising results for sustainable water services delivery. The paper uses a case study of a community of Meidingen in Limpopo from the ASWSD project. The interventions in this village were part of a social innovation project that sought to demonstrate the role of technological innovation towards universal access to safe drinking water. The paper therefore, shows how creative out of the box approaches have potential to pave the way for sustainable service delivery in human settlements.