Last month, Johannesburg Water announced a partnership with Wits Enterprise for a pilot project (URBWAT) 1 to escalate the use of underground water sources (groundwater2) to scale up water supply. Targeting informal settlements, the project aims to support the drilling of boreholes and the installing and managing of storage tanks, taps and systems to purify water and to curb losses and illegal connections. This is not brand new in South Africa, but increasingly relevant, given the technical and governance water problems in far too many municipalities.
The national Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS) estimates that groundwater meets 15% of South Africa’s national water needs3. Two-thirds of the country’s cities and towns are fully or partly dependent on groundwater for domestic needs, and over 74% of the rural population depends on groundwater. Boreholes were also part of Cape Town’s strategy to mitigate the 2017-2019 “Day Zero” crisis, with reasonable success4.
Given South Africa’s tenuous overall water security, the National Groundwater Strategy supports more tapping of aquifers, especially for underserved urban areas. The DWS provides guidelines for municipalities so that groundwater planning, drilling and monitoring can be consistent and well regulated. Its funding for municipalities includes groundwater development as part of basic water supply services.
1 Is more groundwater management viable and scalable?
International experience5 shows that water systems can enhance drought resilience and access to services by lowering infrastructure costs, energy use and water losses. Well-managed, decentralised water treatment systems can help reduce contamination, notably in informal settlements, where treatment systems are fragile and often even lacking.
But groundwater projects rarely fully replace the use of surface water, especially in larger cities and towns with a high demand. The cost of treating groundwater, especially when contaminated, can be high. It makes sense, therefore, to diversify water sources, relying not only on groundwater, but combining it with investing in dams, aquifers, reuse, desalination, etc to avoid the wider water system failing. Cape Town’s water programme after the recent crisis demonstrates that such mitigation is feasible, but it has not been emulated at scale by other metro municipalities in South Africa6.
The DWS has developed standard operating procedures for groundwater planning, exploration, drilling, borehole testing, monitoring, operation and maintenance, but groundwater remains under-utilised for domestic supply. Municipal groundwater initiatives have included the exploration and development of water sources through boreholes, testing aquifers and integrating groundwater into municipal water supply. There also has been private sector interest and support, such as Coca‑Cola’s Coke Ville groundwater community project in Limpopo, the Eastern Cape, Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal, which uses solar-powered groundwater pumping and treatment systems in some municipalities.
Of late, more municipalities have done geological surveys to inform borehole drilling, but in some cases urban groundwater has been negatively affected by underground storage tanks at petrol stations, industrial areas, waste sites, cemeteries, fertilisers used for watering gardens, and inadequate sanitation in informal settlements. Projects like those planned for Johannesburg, therefore, require understanding of existing groundwater development, contamination risks, and the low treatment and quality assurance capacity.
It will take time to optimise groundwater systems in large informal settlements. Apart from developing durable infrastructure, it is necessary to attend more to maintenance, community ownership and the containment of overuse and illegal connections. Wits’s earlier engagement in Alexandra has provided valuable groundwork, but making the groundwater initiatives and equitable community ownership viable in wider Johannesburg will require more assertive drives to enhance community participation.
2 Learning from international experience
South Africa can learn from other countries and cities. Megacities as diverse as Bangkok, Beijing, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Dhaka, Jakarta, Calcutta, Lagos, London, Manila, Mexico City, New Delhi and Shanghai already use groundwater to varying degrees for water supply. In India, Bangladesh, Kenya and Ethiopia, among others, groundwater is a primary source of domestic water in both informal urban and rural settlements.
Managed aquifer recharge and community-managed boreholes have been most viable when communities have been engaged, and where overall extraction and water are treated and tested regularly and are robustly monitored. For example:
- In urban upgrading projects such as in Nairobi’s highly populated Kibera, community boreholes have helped secure daily access and reduced reliance on tanker trucks and contaminated sources7.
- In Lima, Peru, a megacity in an arid climate, up to 40% of the water supply comes from underground sources. The city recognises aquifers as strategic reserves, not merely emergency solutions, so that it has implemented projects to recharge aquifers using treated effluent. Thus, with institutional foresight and good engineering, groundwater can enhance holistic urban water strategy even in large, complex contexts.
- Closer to home, Windhoek is a model for effectively integrating groundwater into an urban supply system, and over time drawing from the local aquifer to supplement surface and recycled water. During Namibia’s regular droughts, up to 60-70% of the city’s daily water supply comes from groundwater, and the municipality actively recharges the aquifer and steps up stormwater harvesting.
3 Institutional and technical support and monitoring are vital
For groundwater management to be sustainable in informal settlements, institutional backing and ongoing monitoring are required. Without these, very real risks and limitations could jeopardise operational management and maintenance, cause over-extraction and weaken the recharge of groundwater. Where informal settlements lack such infrastructure maintenance, groundwater sources are at higher risk of contamination, especially due to poorly managed pit latrines, industrial dumping and surface runoff. As E coli bacteria and nitrates are common pollutants in and near informal settlements, a lack of regular testing and treatment quickly makes boreholes dysfunctional.
Technological innovation and diligence are clearly important, and this Johannesburg-Wits pilot and other groundwater initiatives must include regular hydrogeological surveys and water testing to confirm aquifer capacity and recharge potential. These are not merely technical challenges, however, but hinge on community commitment to safeguard the monitoring of infrastructure, adaptive management and integration with city planning and long-term infrastructure goals. Temporary patch-ups rarely counter health and other issues durably.
The message here is that groundwater initiatives have succeeded in many underserved areas, but they are not silver bullets. The Johannesburg Water-Wits pilot, therefore, could have strong potential if designed with sustainability, equity and resilience in mind. Encouragingly, Wits already has been engaged in urban water and other service analyses and improvements in informal settlements, such as in the suburb of Alexandra. This has involved different skills in engineering, microbiology and ecology, but has also included working with local communities to ensure that the solutions are appropriate and are understood and accepted by the communities. The knowledge gained has enabled Wits researchers to write and comment extensively on water insecurity in the wider Johannesburg area, including addressing intermittent supply, inequity and the lack of durable access.
That said, though, the URBWAT project is primarily about greywater, not so much about extracting underground water, so that the initiative may need support in aquifer yield mapping and hydrogeological work. While it is already giving direction, longer-term success at scale will depend on leveraging institutional capacity and filling gaps in hydrogeology, sustainability and collaboration between the Johannesburg Water company and local communities.
The city’s Water Security Strategy is explicitly committed to diversifying water sources and including groundwater, and it will take a pragmatic, incremental approach to improve registration and monitoring procedures. But the City might need to do more upfront feasibility assessments and programme preparation, for which it could engage with Cape Town for advice on scaling up the groundwater programme. Given Johannesburg’s size and economic importance, upfront planning and groundwater assessments should accompany pilot projects, especially in informal settlements, where immediate water supply needs are high.
4 In summary
Groundwater extraction offers a pathway to improving water access in cities and could help mitigate infrastructure service gaps and contamination risks. But the execution in large urban contexts carries risks beyond technology, especially regarding governance and social legitimacy. For Johannesburg and other South African cities, groundwater could be part of the solution, but only if it is integral to long-term urban water strategy and management.
Johannesburg’s recent governance record still poses very real risks in this respect. This ups the stakes in the forthcoming municipal election, but the city cannot afford waiting until after those elections. Initiatives like the groundwater management one, therefore, deserve being taken seriously by the city and its water department. Other cities and towns, and South Africa as a whole, would do well to take note, too.
- Chris Heymans is an independent analyst and advisor on the political economy of cities, urban development and water and sanitation.
Notes:
1 Acronym for Accessible Greywater Solutions for Urban Informal Townships in South Africa, the consulting arm of the University of the Witwatersrand
2 Groundwater is the water found underground in cracks and spaces in soil, sand and rock. It is stored in and moves slowly through geologic formations of soil, sand and rocks called aquifers. It is commonly used in rural areas and is used for drinking purposes by more than 50% of the people in the United States, including almost everyone who lives in rural areas.
3 https://www.dws.gov.za/Groundwater/norad.aspx
4 Rolfe Eberhardt, “Cape Town Day Zero: Have we learned the right lessons?”, Global Water Intelligence, https://www.globalwaterintel.com/articles/cape-town-day-zero-have-we-learned-the-right-lessons
5 World Water Quality Alliance (2021), “Assessing groundwater quality: A global perspective: Importance, methods and potential data sources”. Report of the Friends of Groundwater in the World Water Quality Alliance information document for the 5th Session of the United Nations Environment Assembly, Nairobi, 2021.
6 https://ws.dws.gov.za/iris/releases/BDN_2023_Report.pdf
7 J Akallah, 2022, “Wells and boreholes: Resilient water provision in Nairobi”, Journal of History of Science and Technology 16(1):48-72
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