When does a “temporary” service become a permanent threat?
In Johannesburg, 52 percent of residents in informal settlements have used the same ventilated improved pit (VIP) toilets for over 15 years, while 32 percent have used them for over 20 years. These toilets were designed to last just five to seven years. Yet, for many residents, there is no indication of when, or even whether they will ever be replaced.
When infrastructure intended to last for only a few years is left in use for decades, the human cost is profound. Dilapidated toilets with broken doors and missing pit covers compromise the safety, health and dignity of every user. In South Africa, the most tragic cases of neglect has already cost children their lives.
A VIP toilet in Meriteng informal settlement with a broken door (left) and an unusable communal waterborne toilet in Buffalo City (right)
The billion-rand “placeholder” problem
Informal settlements in South Africa grow faster than infrastructure can follow. Boundaries shift. Budgets lag. So municipalities turn to chemical toilets, portable toilets, VIP latrines, and communal flush facilities as stopgaps while permanent systems are planned and built. And in many cases, that is a practical response to a real constraint.
Yet between 2018 and 2023, five Gauteng municipalities have already spent R3.36 billion (roughly USD 205.5 million) on chemical toilets.
What started as a temporary sanitation solution has become a long-term arrangement in many municipalities.
Budgets that could have funded permanent infrastructure for thousands of households are now spent on unsustainable and unmantained solutions that leave residents without safe and dignified sanitation.
For the past six years, Asivikelane, a coalition of ten grassroots organizations hosted by the International Budget Partnership (IBP) South Africa, has documented what these issues look like on the ground. Trained community facilitators have collected evidence directly from residents on water, sanitation, impact of disaster and refuse removal, using it to hold municipalities accountable for the services they’re meant to deliver. Asivikelane’s new report, Managing Temporary Sanitation in Informal Settlements: Lessons from Asivikelane, distills six years of that evidence into six practical recommendations for change.
Beyond broken toilets: What six years of evidence reveal
Communal flush toilets in the city of Cape Town
Asivikelane’s six years of monitoring work have produced a consistent, evidence-backed picture of where the system breaks down:
- Residents don’t know if a permanent solution is coming. As of March 2025, 74 percent of residents in assessed municipalities had used the same temporary toilet for more than three years. Only 6 percent were aware of any municipal plan to replace it with a permanent one.
- Instruction is the exception, not the rule. When Asivikelane mapped VIP toilets across Johannesburg in early 2024, 63 percent of users said they received no education at all on how to use or maintain them. VIP toilets require different handling than a flush toilet, including no water for flushing and specific care before desludging, so this isn’t a minor omission.
- The toilets themselves are failing. Of more than 800 VIP toilets mapped in Johannesburg, half had broken doors that couldn’t lock, a third were missing their safety covers entirely, and a third had no functioning ventilation. The data shows that these toilets, as a rule, fall below basic safety standards.
- The budget does not match the policy. The South African National Treasury sets an 8 percent benchmark norm for municipal repairs and maintenance as a percentage of the carrying value of Property, Plant and Equipment (PPE) and investment property owned by a local government. However, Buffalo City’s 2024/25 draft budget allocated only 2.8 percent of its PPE value for repairs. According to the government, this budget also runs out early in the year, as it gets spent on addressing infrastructure vandalism, leaving little room for standard repairs.
- Reporting a fault rarely means it gets fixed. In a 2022 Asivikelane survey, 78 percent of residents said they report faults when infrastructure breaks. But 89 percent of those faults weren’t fixed within a week, and 72 percent were still unresolved a month later. In Buffalo City specifically, 98 percent of residents reported faults through some channel, yet only 15 percent went through the official system. The rest of the reports were relayed informally, straight to a ward councillor or an official the resident happened to know.
Asivikelane’s data has confirmed that residents are engaged, reporting and adapting. However, the systems meant to serve them consistently fall short of matching that effort. This is the gap the six recommendations below are built to close.
Six ways to transform sanitation in South Africa
Based on systematic monitoring and community engagement, the 2026 Asivikelane report identifies six practical recommendations to fix sanitation issues across South African metros:
- Consult with communities from the start. Meaningful engagement before installation ensures solutions are acceptable and safe. In Mangaung, residents expressed a readiness to take ownership of infrastructure if they were involved in the design.
- Make user education mandatory. Many temporary toilets require specific know-how just to function properly, let alone be repaired. Yet, 63 percent of users in Johannesburg reported receiving no instructions upon installation. Missed instruction means faster deterioration, higher repair costs, and rising public health risks.
- Undertake lifecycle budgeting. Municipalities must look beyond upfront costs. Research commissioned by IBP South Africa together with the Social Justice Coalition showed that chemical toilets’ ongoing costs accumulate rapidly, while permanent flush toilets cost less to operate over decades.
- Plan and fund maintenance of both temporary and permanent solutions. Develop maintenance plans with dedicated, ring-fenced funding for repairing informal settlement sanitation infrastructure. Ensure regular monitoring and timely repairs.
- Build functional fault reporting systems. Formal systems demand a street address, an account number or enough mobile data for an app: things many informal settlement residents don’t have. Municipalities should co-design systems with residents that use GPS locations, photo evidence, zero-rated data, and clear escalation procedures when faults are not addressed within specified timeframes.
- Plan the transition from day one. Municipalities should plan and communicate the pathway to permanent sanitation solutions from the outset of any temporary installation. Effective transition planning means funded, actionable timelines for permanent infrastructure; clear, transparent communication with residents about how and when the shift will happen; defined roles and responsibilities for residents throughout both phases; and full lifecycle plans, including proper decommissioning when facilities reach end of life.
Asivikelane's evidence points to the same fix, over and over: build the system with the people who'll live with it, not around them. That approach produces workable, safer solutions.
In Mangaung, municipal officials consulted residents before installing new communal toilets which surfaced clear, specific standards they could incorporate into the designs. In Cape Town and Knysna, training community members as plumbers turned residents from passive users into part of the repair system, cutting down the time it took to resolve breakdowns. And in Johannesburg, residents — not a municipal engineer — came up with the redesigned backslab that can make VIP toilets safer and easier to maintain across the city.
(Left) Asivikelane community plumbers in Knysna fixes water tap during a site visit. (Right) The new VIP backslab design, co-created with Johannesburg residents.
None of these are large, expensive interventions. They are small shifts in who gets a say, and each one produced a solution more durable than anything designed without residents at the table.
Note: This blog draws mainly from the report, Managing Temporary Sanitation in Informal Settlements: Lessons from Asivikelane, authored by Claudi Mailovich and Chumile Sali of IBP South Africa.
For more on Asivikelane’s ongoing work monitoring service delivery in South Africa’s informal settlements, visit asivikelane.org.
