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Prepaid water meters in South Africa

Picture this: you’re thirsty and want a glass of water.   Instead of simply turning on your tap and filling your glass, you must first insert money into a machine to saturate your thirst. It sounds absurd – but this is increasingly what we are asking the poorest in our societies to do. Without money there is no water. Water for All is committed to exposing the violation of not only consumer rights, but the essential right to water when prepaid water meters are used in our communities. One of the respondents in our recent research in South Africa’s Orange Farm township on the outskirts of Johannesburg said in November (2003):

"Prepaid is the violation of human rights and human dignity. Water is not a want, it is a need."

Prepaid water meters take different shapes. In Laredo, Texas in the United States – poor residents in the "colonias" fill their pockets with quarters and travel to the "water machine" provided by the City of Laredo. They have to transport the water to their homes and often stand in line to get their drums filled. At times the water is a trickle but the machine still takes the money - the pump runs based on time, not on how much water it has dispensed.

In a rural KwaZulu Natal in South Africa, a prepaid water system was implemented on communal water taps. Each family needed to buy a plastic card with a chip for R60 (approximately US$9) with additional "water units" available for purchase to supplement the card. The Department of Water has since confirmed that this installment, if not caused, then vastly exacerbated, the largest cholera outbreak in South Africa in known history, because the families who were unable to pay instead went to infected rivers to collect water. Over 200 people died.

Water for All is soon releasing a report on the impact of the use of these meters and we continue to work to ban the use of prepaid water meters.(The United Kingdom is the only country where these meters are currently illegal.)

A link to the new report will be provided in the next issue of Currents. For more information on prepaid water meters, click here.

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