South Africa is faced with the challenge of delivering priority community services. Research shows that past development policies and practices were "top down" with the planners planning and implementing projects without involving communities. Community participation was generally of a token nature and limited to tHe early phases of the project. It was this lack of interaction between the professionals and the community that was often blamed for project failure. Also planners often produced documents or plans that technically appeared right but were not a priority for the communities. The extensive use of technical terminology and planning jargon resulted in the plans often being inaccessible to the communities for which they were prepared. Due to such failures, the process of community participation in development has become a major influence upon development thinking and practice. It is the subject of continuing debate in modern society. Community participation has been recognised as an effective way of helping rural and urban people to focus energy and resources in solving community problems. This is because, when community members organise, plan or share tasks with the professionals, it contributes financially to the projects and helps them take decisions about formulating activities that affect their lives which better meet their needs. / Thesis (M.T.R.P.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2005.

Water is an indispensable basic human need which is protected by several provisions within legislation. However, despite extensive legislation access to water is problematic for many rural schools in South Africa. The achievement of the Millennium Development Goals and national goals that are time bound are not possible with the structural barriers that loom. This research study, sketches the experiences of learners and educators who have been exposed to poor access to water within a rural primary school in Jozini, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. This research study employs a qualitative research paradigm using a case study method to provide an in-depth understanding of the schooling context where there is poor access to water. The main aim was to explore in-depth how the schooling community is affected and what coping strategies are employed to deal with poor access to water. The research study was approached using ecological systems and social justice perspectives. Findings suggest that the consequences of poor access to water at school level are numerous and become even more complex when there is a lack of water at community level. In a compounding manner the consequences have the potential to, in the long term, have irreversible negative effects on learners and their potential to access quality education. Furthermore educators and management are placed in an invidious position to accommodate the challenges associated with poor access to water at school as part of their everyday teaching routine. Educators are failing to teach and learners are failing to learn thus the education system is rendered dysfunctional. The recommendations echo those of the participants who maintain that the community and the school must have access to water in order to improve the quality of life of all. Changes at the structural level in terms of how access to education is defined are a necessity. Co-operative governance, more stringent monitoring and evaluation of the education system, approaching education from a child-friendly perspective, adopting a human rights approach to fiscal spending and the involvement of chapter 9 institutions to ensure social justice are examples of the structural changes required and are part of the recommendations. / Thesis (M.Soc.Sc.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2010.

Through a case study of the Umdoni Local Municipality the study assessed the claims made in the Ugu District Municipality 2008 Report that eMalangeni and eMahlongwa communities have achieved 100 percent water provision. Furthermore, the study used the Rostowrian‟s four of the five-stage model of development to interrogate whether water service provision has improved the standard of living of the people in these two communities. The findings of this study reveal that there is a positive correlation between the installation of water standpipes and an improvement of the standard of living, though it is spread unevenly in these areas. The study concludes that government departments such as the Departments of Water Affairs and Forestry, Agriculture and Rural Development and Land Reform should forge strong relationships aimed at assisting the UDM to achieve its prime objective of improving the quality of life of all who fall under its jurisdiction. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2012.

No abstract available. / Thesis (M.T.R.P.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1991.

The connection between water and human wellbeing is increasingly causing concern about the implications of water scarcity on poverty. The primary fear is that water scarcity may not only worsen poverty, but may also undermine efforts to alleviate poverty and food insecurity. A review of literature revealed that the relationship between water scarcity and poverty is a complex one, with water scarcity being both a cause and consequence of poverty. Furthermore, water scarcity is multidimensional, which makes it difficult to define, while it can also vary considerably, both temporally and spatially. Finally, the relationship between water scarcity and poverty is a difficult one to quantify. Within the context of water scarcity, indicators are viewed by many development analysts as appropriate tools for informing and orienting policy-making, for comparing situations and for measuring performance. However, simplistic traditional indicators cannot capture the complexity of the water-poverty link; hence a proliferation of more sophisticated indicators and indices since the early 1990s. The Water Poverty Index (WPI), one of these new indices, assesses water scarcity holistically. Water poverty derives from the conceptualisation of this index which relates dimensions of poverty to access to water for domestic and productive use. However, the WPI has not been applied extensively at meso-catchment scale, the scale at which water resources managers operate. In South Africa, the Thukela Catchment -in the province of KwaZulu-Natal presents a unique opportunity to assess the WPI at this scale. The Thukela is a diverse catchment with respect to physiography, climate and (by extension) natural vegetation, land use, demography, culture and economy. While parts of the catchment are suitable for intensive agricultural production and others are thriving economic centres, a large percentage of the population in the catchment lives in poverty in high risk ecosystems, with their vulnerability exacerbated by policies of the erstwhile apartheid government. Many rural communities, a high percentage of which occupy these naturally harsh areas, have low skills levels, with a high proportion of unemployed people, low or no income and low services delivery. Infrastructural development, which relates to municipal service delivery, is often made prohibitively expensive by the rugged terrain in which many people live. As in other catchments in South Africa, the Thukela is affected by policies and initiatives aimed at accomplishing the objectives of post-1994 legislation such as the South Africa Constitution and the National Water Act. The potential of the WPI to assess the impacts of these initiatives on human wellbeing and to inform decision .making in the Thukela catchment was investigated. An analysis of a 46 year long series of monthly summations of daily values of streamflows output by the ACRU agrohydrological simulation model has shown that the Thukela, in its entirety , is a water-rich catchment. The reliability of the streamflows, which has implications for communities who collect water directly from 1 streams, is high along main channels but can be considerably less along low order tributaries of the main streams. The flow reliability along the small tributaries is less in winter than in summer. A high percentage of the catchment's population, in addition to being poor and not having access to municipal services, live near, and rely on, the small tributaries for their water supplies. Admittedly, this analysis addresses only one dimension of water poverty, viz. physical water shortage. Nevertheless, the study revealed that despite the Thukela's being a water-rich catchment, many communities are still water stressed. A more holistic characterisation of the water scarcity situation in the Thukela catchment was achieved using the WPI. A review of possible information sources for computing the WPI in South Africa found that many monitoring programmes, information systems and databases are either in existence and are active, or being restructured, or are under different stages of development. If and when they are all fully functional , they should be able to support national assessments of the WPI at meso-scale without the need to collect additional information. A combination of information from some of the active databases and secondary data from other local studies was used to compute the WPI in the Thukela catchment. The assessment uncovered the following: • There is an apparent association between water poverty and socio-economic disadvantage in the Thukela catchment. • There was an improvement in the water poverty situation in most parts of the Thukela catchment between 1996 and 2001, although the degree of improvement varied from subcatchment to subcatchment. Climate change, if it manifests itself by higher temperatures and reduced rainfall, will most likely worsen water poverty throughout the Thukela catchment, with the subcatchments in which many of the poor communities are located being more likely to experience the most severe impacts as the coping capacities of those communities are already strained under current climatic conditions. The findings of this study illustrate the potential of WPI as a tool for informing decision making and policy evaluation at the meso-catchment scale at which many water-related decisions are made. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2006.