Water

In HRV terms, water has moved from a background cost of doing business to a first-order binding constraint on South African growth: it now fails the "camel test" — you see firms, farms, and municipalities visibly contorting themselves around its scarcity and unreliability, paying a high shadow price for workarounds (private boreholes, tankering, relocation, scaled-back investment). The Department of Water and Sanitation's own 2023 *No Drop* report put municipal non-revenue water at roughly 47% — well above the global benchmark of ~30% — while Rand Water's 2024 pressure-management interventions in Gauteng confirmed that Johannesburg is consuming water faster than the Integrated Vaal River System can sustainably supply. When a middle-income economy cannot guarantee bulk water to its financial capital, the constraint is binding in the technical sense: relaxing it would unlock investment across manufacturing, agriculture, data centres, and housing simultaneously.

The database's ten ideas cluster along a familiar HRV fault line between appropriability fixes and coordination fixes. On the appropriability side, Raw Water Pricing Strategy Reform and Water-Use Licence Reform: Streamlining the Application System tackle the price and permit signals that currently deter both conservation and new productive use — the licensing backlog at DWS has been a notorious tax on mining and irrigated agriculture. On the coordination and delivery side, the Bulk Water Infrastructure Investment Programme and Municipal Water Loss Reduction (Non-Revenue Water) speak to the physical capital stock, while Johannesburg Water and Municipal Water Utility Reform and the Water Services Amendment Bill Implementation target the institutional plumbing — ring-fenced utilities, licensing of water services providers, and clearer accountability between DWS, water boards, and municipalities. The common thread is sequencing: pricing and licensing reforms are quick wins that can be executed within existing law, whereas utility restructuring and catchment-level governance are the structural plays whose payoffs arrive over a decade.

Watch three signals over the coming year: whether the Water Services Amendment Bill is tabled and survives its NCOP passage with the licensing-of-WSPs provisions intact; whether DWS clears a visible share of its water-use licence backlog against its published turnaround targets; and whether Johannesburg Water's non-revenue water ratio begins to bend, which would be the first hard evidence that municipal-level reform is biting.