By: Junaid Kader - Head of Public-Private Partnerships and Infrastructure, Tsebo

When the world meets in Stockholm from 23–27 August for World Water Week 2026 under the theme "Water for People and Progress," the conversation will rightly focus on water scarcity, climate variability and the race for new sources of supply. For South Africa, that's the less urgent half of the story.

Our immediate crisis isn't simply the water we don't have. It's also the water we already treat, pump and pay for and then lose before it reaches the consumer. Roughly 47 percent of it never generates a cent: it leaks from ageing pipes, vanishes into illegal connections, or disappears through broken metering and billing. Almost half of everything we produce is gone before it does any useful work. This is a crisis of maintenance and governance long before it is one of rainfall.

Access isn't reliability

On paper, 88 to 90 percent of households have at least a basic water service. That's a real achievement, but access to a connection and access to a reliable water service are increasingly two different things.

A functioning water system requires far more than a pipe connected to a household. It requires reliable bulk supply, treatment capacity, reservoirs, pump stations, distribution networks, pressure management, metering, electricity, operations and maintenance.

When any part of that infrastructure chain fails, the consumer experiences the failure at the tap.

Communities and businesses live with intermittent supply, low pressure and long outages because much of the network is operating well beyond its design life. And the burden lands hardest on the poorest: in many rural areas people still walk long distances for water, while failing sanitation feeds outbreaks of waterborne disease. Department of Water and Sanitation reported average water-supply reliability of only 67% in 2025.

The social cost is significant. Poor communities bear the greatest burden when households must collect water, store it or depend on tankers. Poor wastewater infrastructure creates an additional public-health risk through pollution of rivers and other water resources. The economic cost is equally serious: businesses cannot operate efficiently without reliable water, hospitals cannot provide uninterrupted healthcare, and investors cannot plan confidently around infrastructure that cannot guarantee service.

The World Bank has now explicitly identified deteriorating water and sanitation services as one of the infrastructure constraints raising costs for businesses and households and limiting productivity, investment and inclusive growth.

You can't build your way out of a leak

The instinct in an infrastructure crisis is understandably to build, new dams, new bulk schemes, new treatment plants, desalination and distribution networks

South Africa needs new infrastructure. But new infrastructure cannot substitute for the systematic rehabilitation and renewal of infrastructure we already own.

But the fastest, cheapest gains over the next three years lie in managing what we already have and getting value from infrastructure already in the ground: pressure management, active leak detection, district metered areas, network rehabilitation, pump efficiency, telemetry, asset management, smart metering and billing reform. Pressure management alone has been shown internationally to cut leakage sharply while extending the life of old pipes.

The principle should be simple:

Before investing billions in finding another litre of water, we should ask how much of the water we already have can be recovered. Technology isn't a silver bullet. Where billing collapses and water is delivered but never paid for, infrastructure keeps deteriorating no matter how clever the sensors. The principle should anchor national strategy: the cheapest new source of water is the water we're already losing. Wastewater is an asset, not a liability

Around 66 percent of municipal wastewater systems are rated poor or critically poor, with many linked to unsafe discharges into the rivers communities depend on. Yet Singapore, Israel and Namibia have all shown that properly treated wastewater can safely supply industry, mining, agriculture even drinking water.

The wastewater challenge demonstrates the same infrastructure problem from another angle.

South Africa has substantial installed wastewater treatment capacity, but too much of that infrastructure is operating below the standard required to protect communities and the environment. The deterioration of treatment works results not only in environmental damage but in the loss of an increasingly valuable resource.

Wastewater should therefore be treated as part of the country's water infrastructure portfolio, rather than simply as a disposal problem.

Properly treated wastewater can support industrial use, mining, agriculture and, where appropriate and safely regulated, potable-water supply. Reuse reduces pressure on scarce freshwater resources while extending the economic value of existing treatment infrastructure.

The priority should be to rehabilitate and modernise existing treatment works, improve operations and maintenance, and then develop reuse schemes around them.

This also creates opportunities for infrastructure partnerships. A properly structured wastewater-reuse programme can combine municipal assets, private technical expertise, long-term offtake agreements and development finance.

In other words, the question is no longer simply:

"How do we dispose of wastewater?"

It should increasingly be:

"How do we turn wastewater infrastructure into a source of additional water, environmental protection and economic value?"

When the water stops, healthcare stops first

Water risk now touches every sector, but healthcare is among the most exposed and the consequences are immediate. Within hours of a disruption, surgeries are postponed, sterilisation can be compromised, dialysis can become impossible and infection control systems can be placed under pressure. Hospitals cannot function without water. This is where a disciplined operating model earns its keep: at Tsebo, our 24/7 Emergency Call Centre runs continuous monitoring and rapid technical dispatch to keep critical facilities online. Proactive maintenance beats reactive repair, every time.

Partnership, not privatisation

Public-private partnerships are not about privatising water, they're about bringing additional capital, technical capability, technology, operational discipline and performance management into water infrastructure delivery while Government retains policy, regulation, tariffs and the guarantee of equitable access.

The assets can remain publicly owned while the private sector participates in financing, design, construction, rehabilitation, operations, maintenance, technology and performance management.

South Africa already has proof it works: the Eerste River, Khayelitsha and Sebokeng projects rehabilitated ageing infrastructure and cut losses without transferring ownership, because they were built around measurable outcomes rather than the act of construction. A national programme should target the worst non-revenue-water municipalities first, bundle smaller ones into viable regional projects, and use blended finance to move faster.

One caution: as businesses invest in boreholes and storage, those investments must strengthen the wider system, not become a private escape hatch. The goal is shared resilience, not corporate isolation.

How Will We Know We Are Succeeding??

South Africa's progress should not be measured by the number of new projects announced or the amount of capital committed. It should be measured by tangible improvements in the performance, reliability and sustainability of our water infrastructure and services.

Watch three national performance indicators. They will demonstrate whether we are rebuilding South Africa's water infrastructure and strengthening service delivery.

First, the recovery of non-revenue water. Reducing water losses from the current level of approximately 47% to below 25% over the next decade and ultimately towards international best practice of below 20%, with leading utilities achieving 15% or less would indicate that SA is investing in infrastructure renewal, strengthening asset management, improving operational efficiency and recovering one of the country's largest and most cost-effective untapped water resources.

Second, the condition and performance of water and wastewater infrastructure. A growing proportion of water and wastewater treatment works should consistently comply with national quality and discharge standards, supported by sustained investment in rehabilitation, maintenance and operational excellence. This would indicate that we are preserving and improving the infrastructure on which communities, industry and the environment depend.

Third, the reliability and resilience of water services. Success should be reflected in uninterrupted water supplies to hospitals and other critical facilities, fewer supply interruptions for households, reduced dependence on emergency water tankers, greater confidence among businesses to invest and expand, and improved public trust in municipal service delivery.

Ultimately, the measure of success is not how effectively we respond to infrastructure failures, but how consistently we prevent them. A nation that manages its water infrastructure proactively, renews ageing assets and delivers reliable services creates the foundation for economic growth, improved public health, investor confidence and social well-being.

If South Africa can recover even half of the water, it currently loses while rehabilitating its ageing infrastructure, it will unlock one of the country's largest and most cost-effective new water resources, without having to build a new dam for every additional litre delivered.