Box 1.7: The Kuyasa Project and National Solar Water Heater Rollout Plan
▲ Solar water heating in Potchefstroom, in South Africa’s north-west. ©Abri le Roux. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.
CHAPTER ONE
The Kuyasa Project in Cape Town’s informal settlement of Khayelitsha - the first gold standard clean development mechanism project in the world - undertook a participatory approach to introducing solar water heater geysers, energy-efficient lighting and insulated ceilings in 2,309 homes. At the same time the city developed skills and created 87 jobs in the community. Project costs were low, at around ZAR
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36 million (USD 4.87 million). Kuyasa, a non-government organization, assisted in accessing carbon credits to enable a secondary funding stream for the project (i.e. its longevity and continuity) and the community.154 The project was successfully piloted but faced challenges in attempting to scale up. The South African government has since decided to support the rollout of one million
Water Future water shortages are projected for many African cities. Many are already engaged in upstream water catchment logging that can significantly endanger urban water security in this century. Moreover, many cities in Eastern and Central Africa also depend heavily on hydropower for their electricity supply. Water and rainfall shortages are further projected to impact heavily on rain-fed agriculture. Hence, water is a critical connector in ensuring food and energy security. Guaranteeing water security will require regional agreements and actions, especially for transboundary catchment areas (e.g. the Congo, Zambezi and Nile rivers), and the land-use activities and changes that occur therein.
solar water heaters by 2014, with a 40 per cent subsidy.155 Although this programme has been slow to actualize a national strategy for a large-scale rollout of the geysers, the effort has recently gained momentum and the rollout has reached 330,000.156 The South African government is supporting skills development and employment of youth in solar water heater assembly, installation and maintenance.157
Ensuring urban resilience to flooding and water supply depends critically on upstream catchment management practices and integration strategies and systems. In the Republic of South Africa, catchment management agencies have been established to increase coordination and integration in water catchments. The Inkomati catchment, for example, is a shared water resource critical to water-based services in South Africa’s and Mozambique’s major cities such as Johannesburg and Maputo. It is run by the Inkomati Catchment Management Agency. Johannesburg’s coal-fired electrical plants require large amounts of water and Maputo’s prawn fisheries industry depends on freshwater supply to Maputo Bay. Other African cities along the coast at the end