Budget Notes & Analysis

Feb. 16, 2021: How local governments can use their 2021/22 budgets to provide services to informal settlements without breaking the bank. Read the full synthesis.
Jan. 21, 2021 – Budget Analysis 4: The delivery of basic services to the eThekwini metro’s informal settlements. What does the 2020/2021 Budget say? Read the full analysis.
Dec. 8, 2020 – Budget Analysis 3: Could the City of Ekurhuleni keep on outperforming other metros in the provision of taps and toilets to informal settlements? Read the full analysis.
Dec. 2, 2020 – Budget Analysis 2: This analysis of the 2020/2021 budget of the City of Johannesburg focuses on allocations for basic services in informal settlements. Our central finding is that its 2020/2021 budget will not allow the City to improve the plight of informal settlement residents in the short term. Read the full analysis.
Oct. 27, 2020 – Budget Analysis 1: As the last six months of Asivikelane data show, large numbers of Cape Town informal settlement residents share communal taps and toilets, and these high-use facilities are not sufficiently maintained. These challenges were highlighted by COVID-19, but they preceded it and will persist and escalate unless the City of Cape Town responds on a much larger scale. Read the full analysis.
May 6, 2020 – Metro Budget Notes: When communal toilets are cleaned inadequately or irregularly, they pose a significant health risk to informal settlement residents and this is exacerbated during the Covid-19 pandemic. Municipalities have minimum standards for the frequency of toilet cleaning, but in the context of Covid-19 this standard is likely to be insufficient. One significant way to mitigate the spread of Covid-19 in these communities is to clean communal toilets more frequently. This document estimates what the costs of this additional toilet cleaning might be, using data obtained from metro municipalities, and applied to the cleaning of chemical toilets. We did this costing because we believe that allocating additional funding to this end can significantly reduce the impact of the pandemic on informal settlements, and that this critical intervention has not received the attention that it deserves. Read the full note.