This community is plugging the service delivery gap, one toilet at a time.

It’s pitch-black when your bladder wakes you, but it’s cold, and you also need to think about your sleeping partner who just got home from a long shift, and you’re sure it’s not that urgent… You turn over and drift off again, secure in the knowledge that, if the urge doesn’t subside, a clean, secure solution is available, just a few steps away.

For residents of Diepsloot, about 50km outside the Johannesburg city centre, it’s not that simple.

Though parts of Diepsloot are formal, the majority of its residents live in shacks; though recent figures are hard to come by, many do not have regular access to indoor plumbing. Ablutions are performed with water collected from communal taps and a late-night trip to answer nature’s call means leaving your home to use one of the area’s 644 shared toilets.

Unfortunately, Diepsloot is the rule rather than the exception. Providing access to clean water and sanitation in South Africa’s rapidly growing urban settlements is a seemingly hopeless challenge that lays bare the continued struggle to address the inequalities that were a deliberate hallmark of apartheid spatial planning.

A legacy of poor services

Post-Apartheid, access to electricity and piped water has skyrocketed, but successive local governments have largely failed to provide reliable, functional basic services, or to maintain those that were installed soon after the watershed 1994 general election.

Many of these current shared toilets were installed when the settlement was established in 1995, then simply not maintained for decades. Diepsloot was one of two areas chosen to house the residents of Sevenfontein informal settlement, the other became Cosmo City.

Even as the township’s population grew rapidly and demand for sanitation services exploded. This has far-reaching effects: Diepsloot’s pipes are regularly blocked and its water supply is vulnerable to contamination.

That’s when residents stepped into the void left by local government.

In 2011, the Water, Amenities and Sanitation Services Upgrade Programme (Wassup Diepsloot) was established in the area’s Extension One. Here, between 20 and 60 households rely on a single toilet.

If you want indoor plumbing, look to the privately owned properties of Extension 3. RDP housing in Extensions 2 and 4-11 are a mixed bag because plumbing was introduced after the residents were moved there.

According to the founders, what came after Wassup Diepsloot’s establishment was unprecedented in its reach and impact. With the intention to rely (and wait) less for local government to do its job by upgrading or maintaining the area’s sanitation infrastructure, Wassup successfully sourced both local and international private donors to support its voluntary plumbing services on communal toilets.

It’s a grimy business, of course – but it has also united Extension One’s residents around a common goal.

Unity in the grime

“People here now take pride in their toilets. Sometimes they join us and help out by cleaning during repairs or they help repair and find interest in plumbing skills. It shows that when communities take responsibility for something more people begin to take pride,” said Ramogomana Obed Kekae, Wassup’s director, during a visit by/explain/ to the area.

“Some streets take ownership of the toilet by sharing a key that makes people feel safe while using the toilet and to prevent vandalism and theft.”

Three of Wassup’s founding members are now qualified plumbers and a fourth member is well on his way.

“This is not like working behind a laptop or computer. It was a man’s job but now we are balancing the equation. We have good women in plumbing and we have done training for a lot of young guys who are born after 1994. Some just come here to volunteer for free and upskill themselves,” said Lucky Manyisi. Wassup was his brainchild.

Manyisi says the cooperative model is an excellent way for the city to create skilled artisans in communities who will ensure that maintenance and repairs like potholes and toilets are undertaken speedily because it affects them directly.

Wassup drew international attention in 2016 when it hosted the global community plumbing challenge where teams battled to design and build the most design-friendly and efficient toilet.

The cooperative later partnered with Sticky Situations, a sustainable urban planning NGO, which helped it secure a grant from the Direct Aid Programme (DAP) of the Australian government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) to continue the project. This was followed by the ‘Adopt a Toilet’ campaign in which international donors, both corporate and private, could pay $100 – around R1730 at today’s exchange rate – to adopt one of Diepsloot’s toilets.

Donors don’t just pay and disappear, though: they get to choose the paint colour for ‘their’ toilet’s stall and receive regular updates from the team.

Another partnership is with BluLever, an apprenticeship training programme. In March of this year more than 40 plumbing apprentices from BluLever spent a week with Wassup in Diepsloot. “We aimed to repair 40 toilets but were at 32 toilets by #Day 2,” Wassup reported proudly on its Facebook page.

But there are blockages in the system. Recently, donors have been scarce, and, by mid-year, there had been just one toilet adoption for 2022.

“I won’t say we are seeing success. Since it started only around 11 toilets have been adopted. If we had ten adoptees in a space of three months then we will see benefits to us and the community. Right now, we are reliant on PlumbLink, a local supplier who donates products to us for repairs,” Kekae said.

Although pleased with the international partnership’s benefits, Wassup sees the real opportunity in local partners who are more accessible and transparent.

“You would expect a government leader to be the first to adopt a toilet to encourage these kinds of initiatives because they work,” he added.

Despite the challenges, though, Wassup’s team is upbeat. Their work aims to restore dignity, one toilet at a time, and, with the right support, the strides they’ve already taken won’t go down the drain.

This article was written as part of explain.co.za’s Lede Fellowship with the Solutions Journalism Network.