While quality health care is a fundamental human right in South Africa, under-resourced municipalities still face a lack thereof even post Apartheid. Today, many underprivileged South Africans face the consequences of segregation and are highly fragmented, with discriminatory effects visible in the healthcare system.
Now, people from underdeveloped municipalities and regions struggle to access healthcare due to the many challenges faced in their communities. In this article, we will take a look at the challenges municipalities face and what can be done to curb them.
Infrastructure Is The Road To Success
Many under-resourced municipalities struggle with almost the same challenges. Their roadwork is struggling, preventing them access to travelling for their healthcare needs. With potholes, small ponds and streams, the roads often become challenging to manoeuvre. While we know how to correct the infrastructure and build more roads, we stand an opportunity of hiring the people who live in these communities to do the job. Thus retaining livelihoods.
Introduce Greener Municipalities
Energy shortage is a big thing in many African countries. Even in areas that rely on electricity and use it for their daily living, it is a struggle. Total decarbonisation– the environmental goal to be reached within just a few years from now– means that the world’s electric systems need to give up fossil fuels and aim instead at using renewable energies, to oppose the global climate warming currently underway. Under-resourced municipalities need these energy sources more and more each day because they are the ones that suffer the blow of global warming more.
Working On Water Supply Will Work
Under-resourced municipalities face many basic needs challenges, and water and sanitation is no exception. Even healthcare facilities in rural under-resourced areas struggle with water and sanitation, making it difficult to provide care for patients. We can curb water and sanitation challenges in these areas by providing water tanks and installing pipes for tap water access, as most of these areas’ problems are accessing clean water.
DBSA’s Role
We serve as project planning support to under-resourced municipalities. We do this through our carefully designed non-lending development subsidy. The purpose of this is to facilitate projects that help under-resourced municipalities with a “Master Plan” in water, sanitation, electricity, roads and stormwater, and infrastructure investment plans.
The majority of under-resourced municipalities are characterised by the lack of or inadequate infrastructure plans, which affect sustainability provided by municipalities to communities in many ways. Prioritising infrastructure projects that build up municipalities accelerates the productivity of the beneficiary municipalities.
Put simply, beneficiary municipalities get the ability to provide the required services to their respective communities. This increases access to opportunities for the people in these communities. That’s how we, as one of the development finance institutions in South Africa, play a role in rural development.
Final thoughts
We need to work together in finding sustainable and future-proof solutions to the under-resourced municipalities’ problems in Africa. To do this, we need to support them, and this can be done by assisting with financing for these municipalities. This will help better the lives of South Africans as they are the driving force of a better South Africa and an active economy.