Improving water services – How to prioritize what needs to get done

In order to support good and effective decision making, primarily at the local government level and yet also to support alignment with other regional and national role-players, South Africa’s Department of Water Affairs (DWA) supports an annual process of establishing the baseline vulnerabilities affecting water services business health at all municipal WSAs in South Africa. The Municipal Strategic Self-Assessment (MuSSA) has now been extended to include a sector collaborative Municipal Priority Action Plan (MPAP) which addresses the identified key vulnerabilities of each WSA.

For performance enablement to become effective it is important that simple yet effective measures are put in place to alleviate the identified vulnerabilities preventing good performance; this is managed through a “Plan-Do-Check-Act” continual improvement framework. To oversee and manage the continual improvement framework a Municipal Priority Action Plan (MPAP) process has been jointly developed by DWA National, the South African Local Government Association (SALGA), DWA KwaZulu Natal’s (KZN) Water Sector Support and the pioneering municipality, Uthukela District Municipality (DM).

The aforementioned process is being rolled out in both KZN and Gauteng in a joint initiative between DWA National’s Water Services Directorate: Planning and Information and the two the DWA Regional Offices. Roll-out of the MPAP process to other provinces is currently being investigated. Importantly, the MuSSA/MPAP process is also closely aligned to the Water Services Development Planning (WSDP) process, and to SALGA’s Municipal Benchmarking Initiative.

The ability of this relatively straightforward process to facilitate alignment between technical and elected municipal officials is contributing substantially to improvements in (i) municipal self-management, (ii), sector aligned development of local government, and (iii), national policy development and regulation in South Africa.

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