Infrastructure

All Municipalities within the Province strive to provide informal settlements with access to basic services with the exception of Laingsburg Municipality, which does not have any informal settlements.

There are a number of issues which may affect the provision of services, for example the private ownership of potentially occupied land, bulk electrical constraints requiring funding provision from Eskom or bridge funding, before household electrification can be considered, general bulk service constraints, the suitability of the occupied land for permanent settlement, etc. Although my Department wishes to upgrade all informal settlements with the optimal ideal being to provide all residents with permanent serviced sites, the complex contextual realities, project readiness, community readiness, increasing demand, capacity constraints and diminishing budgets have meant that the Province has to prioritise certain projects over others. 

1. According to the Department’s Informal Settlement Database for the Non-Metro municipalities collated in 2023: 79 informal settlements (across 17 municipalities) lack access to electricity; 24 informal settlements (across 8 municipalities) lack access to sanitation; and 19 informal settlements (across 7 municipalities) lack access to water. Similar to the non-metro municipalities, the City of Cape Town also has settlements with limited or no access to basic services. The information provided below speaks only to non-metro municipalities data.

(i) Lack of access to electricity reported in the following municipalities: Beaufort West, Breede Valley, Bitou, Drakenstein, George, Knysna, Langeberg, Matzikama, Mossel Bay, Oudtshoorn, Overstrand, Saldanha Bay, Stellenbosch, Swartland, Swellendam, and Theewaterskloof from our last 2023 Informal Settlement database update.

(ii) Lack of access to sanitation reported in the following municipalities: Beaufort West, Breede Valley, Langeberg, Matzikama, Mossel Bay, Stellenbosch, Swartland, Theewaterskloof. 

(iii)Lack of access to water: Beaufort West, Mossel Bay, Oudtshoorn, Swartland, Saldanha Bay, Stellenbosch, and Theewaterskloof from the 2023 informal settlement database update.

2. According to the 2023 Informal Settlements Database, an estimated total of 155,449 residents are affected by service deficiencies. of these, 74,735 lack access to electricity, 66,884 face sanitation challenges, and 13,830 are affected by inadequate water services.
3. My Department’s delivery Business Plan illustrates the budgets allocated for various projects under the Upgrading of Informal Settlements Programme (UISP) for the MTEF period until 2027.  This Business Plan is updated regularly when project applications are submitted by municipalities and assessed through the lens of readiness by my Department. Various types of informal settlement upgrading projects are included in the multi-year plan, ranging from projects providing shared basic services to permanent serviced sites.  Each project is unique in size, context, and complexity, and funding allocations vary from project to project.

The funding projections, as per The Departments’ Three-Year Delivery Business Plan, illustrate that the Province will rapidly need to accelerate delivery to keep pace with the growing demand posed by informal settlements, keeping in mind the competing demand from applicants registered for housing assistance on the various municipal housing demand databases. 

With the added challenge of the shrinking fiscus, my Department is currently looking at ways in which more citizens can be assisted by providing services on a shared basis, by utilising re-blocking and super-blocking as an incremental path to upgrading, minimising the need for greenfield developments and costly and complex relocation exercises. Noting the current MTSF performance and challenges experienced, my Department will be intensifying its approach towards incremental informal settlement upgrading by providing basic services through superblock and re-blocking approaches.  

The majority of our informal settlements are located in areas with limited to no decanting or relocation sites, thus making the superblock and re-blocking approach ideal for Western Cape realities.