Fees and governance: Towards sustainability in water resources management at schools in post-apartheid South Africa

Abstract

Water scarcity is increasingly staking a claim next to energy as a threat to the sustainability of large cities, especially in developing countries with limited resources. The recent crisis brought on by Cape Town’s “Day Zero” drought created the impetus to expand on existing research on water demand management to include analysis of school usage patterns and key determinants thereof. With the effects of apartheid still visible in society and in school infrastructure coupled with the high water usage rates at schools, this paper evaluates the impact of school affluence (whether it is fee-paying or not, and self-governing or not) on water usage. We find that poor schools use substantially more water, partially because of poor maintenance, with mean water efficiencies of poor schools around 50% and 80% for affluent schools. Bayesian models were used to further determine which characteristics of a school are good proxies for the higher usage to help administrators and policy makers in the resource constrained educational environment. In addition to the obvious detrimental impact of poor maintenance, the results also point an incriminatory finger at early morning-school usage, early afternoon usage, and Saturday usage.