April 2016 | Research commissioned by the International Budget Partnership working in partnership with the Social Justice Coalition
In terms of the South African Constitution, municipalities are responsible for “domestic waste-water and sewage disposal systems.” Consequently, the City of Cape Town is responsible for ensuring that sanitation services are extended to all residents within its jurisdiction.
It is against this background that, in April 2016, the International Budget Partnership South Africa and the Social Justice Coalition commissioned Cornerstone Economic Research to develop a model to cost sanitation upgrade scenarios for informal settlements across Cape Town. This report presents a range of costed sanitation scenarios for four specific sections of Khayelitsha, namely CT Section, Enkanini, RR Section, and TR Section. These serve as case studies of the kind of information the Sanitation Costing Model can generate. The model is set up to cover all the informal settlements in Cape Town, and can be used to develop scenarios for the rollout of sanitation services in all these areas.
The Sanitation Costing Model is built around information that the City of Cape Town has placed in the public domain, or that is available in public documents. There is no doubt that the City of Cape Town has further information that could usefully inform and strengthen the model. However, even in its current form the model is sufficiently robust to inform discussions around rollout scenarios, priorities and budget for sanitation in Cape Town. The model is designed to be flexible, so that where the City of Cape Town has better information, the model can be updated or modified appropriately.