Water supply in Venda RSA

A drought relief task force was set up to deal with the drought in South Africa in June 1992. The task force was split up with teams working in each of the homelands. The Venda group operated in both urban and rural areas. This paper outlines the work of the northern team that worked in the rural area close to the borders of Zimbabwe and the Kruger National Park. Sixty villages were identified and surveyed over an area of about 3,000 Km2. The majority of the communities had inadequate water supply due to poor management, lack of community involvement and homeland consolidation policies. The crisis of the present drought is related more to the endemic poverty of rural South Africans and poor manage­ment than simply to lack of water. A two pronged attack was made on the problem: I) An emergency water supply programme consisting of trucking water, repairing existing broken hand pumps and drilling new wells. 2) A long term programme to train village level facilitators so that the villagers could manage their own affairs. The paper will explain the rationale of working with long and short term aims simultaneously and the importance of educating the local professionals to manage the facilitation programme.