Studies undertaken in South Africa have found that social franchising partnerships for the routine maintenance of infrastructure could alleviate and address many challenges in the management of water services. A three-year pilot project has drawn to a successful conclusion. This provided selected infrastructure maintenance services to approximately 400 schools in the Butterworth education district in the Eastern Cape province. Half a dozen franchisee microbusinesses were created, and of the order of three dozen previously unemployed people were taught workplace skills. Irish Aid funded the concept development, but the franchisees were paid from the normal schools operation and maintenance budgets. Despite difficulties arising directly from provincial education department inefficiencies, the pilot project has proven the value of social franchising partnerships for this kind of work – the department now has a model it can roll out to the rest of the more than 4,000 rural schools across the Eastern Cape. Many opportunities lie in applying the same approach to other operation and/or maintenance activities within the water and sanitation services delivery chain. The time is ripe to further develop the concept so that it can move up the technology ladder, expanding its range of competencies beyond its current tried and tested boundaries.
Having viewed the successful social franchising partnerships pilot programme that serviced sanitation facilities at 400 schools in the Butterworth District of the Eastern Cape of South Africa, the Amathole District Municipality (ADM) expressed interest in exploring how well the partnership model could empty household pit latrines in its jurisdiction. The impact and effectiveness of the model was demonstrated by the emptying, by five franchisees over a period of only six weeks, of the contents of 400 household ventilated improved pit latrines in Govan Mbeki Village, and the safe disposal of their content. The paper describes the methods and results in removal and disposal of faecal sludge. Problems were encountered, and the solutions (technical, institutional and social) are described. Not unexpectedly, the amount of effort involved in this work – including time, training required, equipment required and ingenuity – varied enormously. The main variables included the type of top structure, the nature of the pit contents, whether or not there was broad consistency of type and contents in an area, distances (between pits, from home base to work site, from pits to disposal site, from location of specialized equipment to work site), logistical delays (e.g. non-arrival of equipment) and bureaucratic hold-ups (especially payment delays).
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