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Africa: Access to Water and Sanitation in South Africa: a Tale of Insufficiency and Inequality

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Africa: Access to Water and Sanitation in South Africa: a Tale of Insufficiency and Inequality


Share of households experiencing water shortages has doubled over the past decade.

Key findings

  • Water supply ranks third among the most important problems that South Africans want their government to address. Only unemployment and crime/security are deemed more important.
  • o A decade ago, water supply was ninth on the list of citizen concerns.
  • o Rural residents are more than twice as likely as urbanites to identify water supply as a national priority.
  • Six in 10 South Africans (60%) say their household experienced a lack of clean water during the previous year, including 22% who say this happened “many times” or “always.”
  • o The share who report water shortages has doubled over the past decade.
  • Among enumeration areas (EAs) visited by Afrobarometer field teams, 63% have a piped-water system. Urban areas are more than twice as likely as rural areas to boast water pipes (76% vs. 32%).
  • South Africans’ main source of water for household use is a piped public or community water system (77%), though some people rely on tubewells or boreholes (12%), water purchased from a cart or truck (5%), or surface water (3%).
  • o Almost all urbanites (92%) enjoy piped water, compared to just 38% of rural residents.
  • Nearly four in 10 South Africans (37%) say they have had to change the source or reduce the amount of water they use as a consequence of changing weather patterns in the past five years.
  • A slim majority (54%) of surveyed EAs have sewage systems. This figure drops to just 7% in the countryside, vs. 73% in cities.
  • Fewer than half (47%) of respondents have a toilet in their home, while another 34% have facilities outside their dwelling but within their compound. A significant share rely on toilets outside their compound (15%) or say they have no access to toilets or latrines (4%).
  • Almost three-fourths (73%) of citizens disapprove of the government’s provision of water and sanitation services, up by 25 percentage points over the past decade.


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Access to clean, reliable water and safe, hygienic sanitation are constitutionally guaranteed rights in South Africa. However, many citizens do not receive these basic services. Access to piped water in the country increased from 73.4% in 2011 to 82.4% in 2022, but the share of households that receive a reliable daily supply of water is only 68.8% (Mutsila, Mashishi, Marais, Payne, & Carnie, 2026; Ngema, 2026). And not all publicly provided water is clean. A 2023 Department of Water and Sanitation report revealed that 46% of the country’s water supply systems pose acute health risks due to pathogens found in them, and only 26 of 958 water-supply systems meet the target of 95% drinkable water (du Plessis, 2023).

In several provinces, non-revenue water rates (the percentage of water lost before it reaches a customer) are above 50% due to leaks, operational inefficiencies, and illegal connections (Parliamentary Monitoring Group, 2026). The South African government acknowledges that water insecurity – a lack of reliable access to enough safe water – stems from a combination of factors, including climate change, ageing infrastructure, socioeconomic inequality, and poor municipal management. Degradation of wetlands, siltation of dams, rising demand, and corruption in the water sector have exacerbated the situation (SA News, 2025, 2026).

There has been slow progress on access to sanitation: The share of citizens who have flush toilets grew from 56.5% in 2002 to 66.7% in 2024 (Statistics South Africa, 2025). But frequent sewage spills highlight the government’s failure to adequately maintain sewerage; many water-treatment plants release untreated sewage into rivers and oceans (eNCA, 2025). Unsafe sanitation remains a major concern beyond microbiological contamination of water systems: In 2026 alone, at least three children have drowned in pit toilets at schools, despite a law requiring their removal by 2016 (Thorne, 2026; Moropane, 2026; Velaphi, 2026). Last year, the Department of Water and Sanitation (2025) launched the National Sanitation Integrated Plan, a 10-year blueprint aiming to achieve universal access to sanitation, reverse the declining performance in sanitation provision, improve climate resilience in the sector, and create economic opportunities in the sanitation value chain.

Meanwhile, the government is addressing the water crisis through Operation Vulindlela, a reform programme coordinated and driven by a unit in the Presidency. The National Water Crisis Committee identified the root of the crisis as the failure by local governments to ringfence revenue generated by water sales and reinvest it in water infrastructure and provision. President Cyril Ramaphosa has observed that in most municipalities there is “a lack of a proper separation between the functions of water services authorities and water services providers.” The president pledged support to struggling municipalities to expand access to water, especially in underserved communities (SA News, 2026).

Afrobarometer’s Round 10 survey sought ordinary South Africans’ perspectives on water and sanitation services.