Johannesburg: The Deputy Minister of Water and Sanitation, Sello Seitlholo, has emphasised the importance of funding skills training programmes in the water sector to improve service delivery at municipal level. “We must continue to make every effort to fund, support and incentivise such programmes to ensure that we harness the skills we need to improve the state of our municipalities,” Seitlholo said on Saturday.
According to South African Government News Agency, the Deputy Minister was addressing the five-year celebration of the Young Engineers Changemakers Programme (YECP), organised by the Water Research Commission (WRC) in partnership with the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology. The YECP was launched five years ago to empower a new generation of municipal engineers in efforts to contribute to sustainable service delivery. It provides opportunities for young South African engineers to partake in testing potential innovative water and sanitation solutions in real-world sites and to gain the necessary skills required to drive municipalities of the future which are sustainable, liveable, and build socio-technical infrastructure and services.
To date, 50 young engineers from 21 municipalities around the country have been trained over the last five years. The Deputy Minister congratulated the young engineers and reminded them that their core purpose was to make a positive contribution in arresting the decline of engineering skills in the municipalities. “We meet here to celebrate both the milestone of this important programme as well as to take stock of its potential and future in helping us address the challenges which threaten to cripple our democracy. We cannot fix South Africa without fixing municipalities. For us to fix municipalities, requisite skills and capacity should be taken into consideration and should be prioritised. It is for this reason that we should acknowledge the joint efforts by the WRC and Department of Science, Innovation and Technology to empower the engineers,” Seitlholo said.
He pointed out that a cause of failing infrastructure was a lack of capacity and skills in municipalities, particularly engineering skills. The Deputy Minister highlighted that municipal water and sanitation services are deteriorating, as revealed by the recent Green Drop, Blue Drop, and No Drop assessment reports released by the Department of Water and Sanitation. Sixty-four out of 144 Water Services Authorities (WSAs) scored ‘critical’ on average across their water supply systems and/or wastewater systems in the 2023 Blue Drop and 2022 Green Drop assessments.
“This is a bleak sign that municipalities, constituting a majority of WSAs, are in crisis. If the state of governance in municipalities does not improve and we do not capacitate municipalities with skilled engineers and planners, we will face a crippling water crisis. And unlike with our electricity crisis, water is a resource that cannot be replaced,” he said. The Deputy Minister expressed that the YECP was a positive initiative that will help turn things around as municipalities are in dire need of capacity and skills. He stated that the department and other sector role players will continue to provide targeted support to local government through various support and intervention programmes aimed at improving water services.