Work in Mbizana

Hello! This is Tanya writing. I thought I would write something about life as a UNV in South Africa and work in Bizana.

Work with the UNDP in South Africa has been very interesting. I am one of five other United Nations Volunteers (UNVs) working in the Mbizana Local Municipality in the Eastern Cape. We are a very international community- the other volunteers are from Ethiopia, Bhutan, Singapore, and Uganda. We are all on 1-year contracts with UNDP. The UNV from Uganda is our team leader and he coordinates the four of us UNV engineers along with four Accenture Development Program (ADP) professionals (volunteers through the company Accenture)- all Americans- working in the areas of HR, IT, Finance, and Local Economic Development (LED).

The program is part of a larger government program called Project Consolidate. Project Consolidate focuses on building capacity within local municipalities in order to provide delivery of basic services (roads, water, sanitation, housing, electricity, and refuse collection).

Each of the four of us engineers works within a service delivery sector and I am the person responsible for water and sanitation. Unlike the other sectors, water and sanitation is currently not the responsibility of the Local Municipality, but the responsibility of the District Municipality (a larger regional area). So far my work has involved developing a workplan that is in the interest of the Local Municipality but coordinated with the District Municipality.

The first part of this workplan involves visiting all the communities in the Local Municipality, conducting a baseline assessment of the water and sanitation situation, and creating an asset inventory of any existing infrastructure. In many ways this initial work is similar to the work I was doing in 2005 in Sri Lanka.

The next step will be to deliver “quick wins” in water and sanitation by repairing any assets that have not been maintained (lack of maintenance is a huge problem) and writing operation and maintenance (O&M) manuals. The last few months of the plan focuses on prioritization and budgeting for new projects.

The Mbizana Local Municipality is one of the poorest in the country and is part of the former transkei (homeland) area. Aside from lacking basic services, AIDS has had a dramatic effect on the population age distribution– in Mbizana 60% of the population is less than 25 years old, and 30% is less than 5 years old. Another challenge is that many people lack skill and education in this area of the country as a consequence of apartheid. On the positive side, people seem generally happy and love to sing and dance.