Today is World Water Day, a day that is dedicated to raising awareness regarding water conservation and echoing the importance of sustainable management of this extremely scarce resource.
With a lot of attention focused on the water crisis faced by South Africa recently, it is important to look at some facts about water in the country.
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88 per cent of SA households have access to water
Statistics South Africa’s 2016 General Household Survey estimated that 88.8 per cent of South African households had access to piped water, compared to 81.2 per cent in 1996. Households in the Western Cape are most likely to have access to piped water, whereas those in Limpopo and the Eastern Cape are less likely to have access to piped water.
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Piped water in less than 50 per cent of South African homes
While close to 90 per cent of South African households can access piped water, most of these households don’t have water running directly into their homes. Less than half (46.4 per cent) of South African households are estimated to have water piped in their homes, 26.8 per cent have access to water on their property while 13.3 per cent need to share a communal tap.
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South Africa has less water per person than Botswana and Namibia
United Nations’ Aquastats data shows that South Africa has more renewable freshwater resources than Botswana and Namibia. In 2013, it had a total of 44.8 billion m³ of water available – a quarter of the capacity of the Kariba, Africa’s largest dam. But these resources are stretched thin when population size is taken into account. For every person in South Africa, the country had 822.2 m³ of fresh water available at last count – compared to 1.061 m³ per resident of Botswana. In Namibia, each resident theoretically has access to 2.505 m³ of water. This is about the volume of an Olympic size swimming pool.
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South Africa is the 39th ‘driest’ country in the world
The average rainfall a country receives in a year is one way to measure how dry a country is. Data from the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s Aquastat database provides comparable figures for 182 countries around the world. It is often reported that South Africa is the 30th driest country in the world. But the latest figures show that South Africa had an annual rainfall of 495 mm in 2014, moving it slightly down the rankings to 39th position. Egypt (51 mm), Libya (56 mm) and Saudi Arabia (59 mm) had the lowest annual rainfall in 2014.
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Just 66 per cent of average annual rainfall in 2015
There are a number of ways of defining a drought. The South African Weather Service considers an area to be experiencing a meteorological drought when it receives less than 75 per cent of its normal rainfall. South Africa received its lowest rainfall between January and December 2015 since the national recording of rainfall began in 1904. Since 1904, rainfall in all nine provinces has averaged 608mm per year, while South Africa received only an average of 403mm (66 per cent of the annual average) in 2015. Previously, the lowest rainfall received in a year was in 1945, when South Africa received 437mm (72 per cent).
Source: Africa Check
