Universal access to sustainable and equitable sanitation is a Sustainable Development Goal
on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The South African government has taken
strides to try and meet both international and domestic development goals with its Free Basic
Sanitation policy, for which a national implementation strategy was developed in 2008.
Although the policy was formulated at a national level, municipal governments are delegated
the authority to ensure service delivery at the local level. Municipalities have adapted and
interpreted the policy to suit their own contexts. In particular, they have attempted to address
the challenge of providing sanitation services to informal settlements using different
approaches with varying degrees of success and often without explicit consideration or
guidance for how to incorporate sustainability and equity principles.
The aims of this thesis are thus to explore how the concepts of sustainability and
equity can be applied to improve municipal sanitation services in South African informal
settlements and to explore how various dimensions of sanitation and equity relate to
sanitation. A comparative case study method using the lens of sustainability and equity was
used to critique the approaches to providing sanitation services to informal settlements in
three of South Africa’s largest municipalities: eThekwini (Durban), Johannesburg and Cape
Town. Each municipal case study incorporated an embedded case study that was used to
examine sanitation services in selected informal settlements at a programme, project or
settlement level. Primary data was collected using interviews and field visits. Secondary data
was obtained from national and municipal records such as water and sanitation department
reports, census data from Statistics South Africa, and municipal geographical information
system databases.
Findings from the thesis indicate that there is a need to better incorporate multiple
stakeholders’ perspectives on what sustainable and equitable sanitation services should be
like. Strengths and weaknesses of each municipality’s approach to sanitation service
provision were compared and used to identify factors relating to sustainability and equity. A
major conceptual gap identified in sanitation service delivery approaches is the need to
emphasise equity as a core tenet of sustainability, especially in a socio-economic context of
extreme inequality. This thesis makes a contribution towards knowledge by highlighting the
importance of equity to support sustainable sanitation service delivery in South African
informal settlements, adding new perspective into different dimensions of equity in sanitation
and a suggested framework for how they could be incorporated into M&E practices.