In the peri-urban community of Ngwenya, Livingstone, Memory Tembo’s livelihood was once dictated by a constant, exhausting hustle for water. As a resident and a landlady, she spent her days navigating logistical hurdles and financial losses. Because her rental property lacked a formal utility connection, her tenants had to walk to distant communal points or buy water from informal vendors at inflated prices.
“It was very difficult to attract and keep good tenants when we didn’t have water on the property. People would leave after just a few months because they were tired of carrying containers,” Tembo explains.
For Tembo, the situation created a severe economic trap. She was paying significantly more per litre for poor-quality, unregulated water than residents in better-served parts of the city paid for treated utility water. The high cost of securing water for her tenants reduced the income available for household needs and property improvements, while unreliable access to water made it harder to attract and retain tenants.
Today, that economic trap has been dismantled. WSUP partnered directly with the Southern Water and Sanitation Company (SWSC) to build a resilient, formal network extension capable of reaching households like Tembo’s.
Instead of deploying superficial fixes, WSUP’s technical strategy focused on complete network rehabilitation. The intervention systematically replaced shallow, leaking, and poorly routed “spaghetti” pipes with high-quality, crack-resistant PE100 pipes buried at technically correct depths to ensure long-term durability.
WSUP and SWSC worked directly with a localised Project Task Team to ensure community engagement and promote demand for household connections. This direct community collaboration helped to market household connections whose official fee was reduced by SWSC to make it easier for households to afford the connections and smoothed the transition to the formal water network.
To protect the newly strengthened system, WSUP facilitated the installation of individual household connections with lockable taps while the utility provided meters.
The arrival of reliable water has completely rewritten Tembo’s financial ledger. Moving from an informal water seeker to a recognised utility customer has given her total control over her property’s primary asset.
“But now, I have my own meter. I have a lock on my tap. I am the one in control of my own water. I can even save money now, and my small business is finally growing. The water is there any time, any minute,” Tembo says, pointing to the secure connection.
The locking mechanism has become an important management tool, helping Tembo monitor usage transparently and manage shared access fairly, while reducing misunderstandings over water use and costs. With reliable running water now available on the premises and included in the rental agreements, tenants report that children are arriving at school clean, on time, and ready to learn.
By cutting out exploitative informal water vendors, Tembo is finally reinvesting her rental savings into property maintenance, transforming her property into a viable, expanding enterprise.