Measurement and modelling of households' demand and access to basic water in relation to the rapidly increasing household numbers in South Africa.
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Date
2010
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Abstract
Service delivery in post-apartheid South Africa has become a topical
issue both in the academia and the political arena . The rise of social
movements, the xenophobic tensions of May 2008 and protest actions could
be noted as the major traits of post-apartheid South Africa. Though there
are divergent views on the underlying causes of these protests, lack of service
delivery has most significantly been at the centre stage. In this thesis we
investigate the relationship between household/population changes and the
demand for piped-water connection in South Africa. There is an ample,
albeit at times of questionable accuracy, supply of statistics from official
and other sources. These statistics are both the source of inspiration of
particular societal measures to be investigated and a gauge of the accuracy
of the mathematical/statistical modelling which is the central feature of this
project.
We construct mathematical/statistical models which take into account
demographic constituents of the problem using differential equations for
modelling household dynamics and we also investigate the interaction of
demographic parameters and the demand for piped-water connection using
multivariate statistical techniques.
The results show that with a boost in delivery the rich provinces seem
to be in better standing of meeting targets and that the increasing demand
in household-based services could be most significantly attributed to the
fragmentation of households against other demographic processes like natural increase in population and net migration. The results imply that in as
much as service delivery policies and programmes should focus on formerly
disadvantaged poor communities, adequate provisions for increasing service
demands in urban centres should also be a priority in view of the increasing
in-migration from rural areas as households fragment. Most of the findings/results are in tabular and graphical forms for easy understanding of
the reader.
Description
Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Westville, 2010.
Keywords
Water--Supply and demand--South Africa., Water consumption--Measurement--South Africa., Theses--Mathematics.