Water Awareness Award
Finalist: Umgeni Water’s Water Education Programme
Michelle Nel
Umgeni Water has produced a range of water-education resources that have proved so successful with users the United Nations has adopted aspects of its education programme.
The UN is using the model in the Six Cities Water for Africa Project, an 18-month pilot project to encourage water-demand management. Orders for Umgeni resources have come from as far afield as Kenya, Zambia, Ghana, Poland, India, Venezuela, the United States, Britain and Australia.
Umgeni’s External Education Services (EES) unit, which produces the materials, also shows people how to use them, teaching them how to care for their water resources.
Since 1992 more than 3?400 presentations and water conservation workshops have been held for schoolchildren, rural communities, teachers, health workers and other special interest groups. Last year alone more than 235 water workshops involving 21?000 students took place at the request of communities and educational institutions.
“Communities and schoolchildren have begun to see their environments in a different light and have become empowered to change things for the better,” says Steve Camp, manager of the EES and author of a number of its resources.
This realisation has come not a moment too soon: the incidence of water-borne diseases in South Africa is one of the highest in the world.
Umgeni Water, established in 1974, is the largest water authority in KwaZulu-Natal, centred on Durban and Pietermaritzburg. It operates by integrated catchment management principles and its environmental management has a strong awareness component, which is where the EES unit comes in.
EES develops materials and implements training programmes. Water workshops are tailor-made to meet the needs of each interest group, using the wide variety of materials published by the unit. Teaching aids range from video or computer presentations to show-and-tell posters for illiterate communities.
The unit has also produced colourful educational books and has its own dedicated water education vehicle. A water classroom has been set up at the Umgeni Training Centre on the outskirts of Durban.
Since the outbreak of cholera last year, the EES has run countless water, health and hygiene workshops to try to break the cycle of infection. It has also developed the Mini South African Scoring System, which is used to measure the health of a river by counting the numbers of invertebrates. This system does not measure potability, however, because it cannot detect the presence of harmful bacteria or viruses.