A paper presented by Peter B. Robinson on 21-23 January 2003, Muldersdrift, South Africa.

At independence in 1980, the new government inherited a highly skewed economy with the majority of the population living on racially demarcated subsistence farming areas known as 'communal areas'. In rural water and sanitation programmes, the focus was on clean water for household use. It was anticipated that improved health would indirectly contribute to reduced poverty through higher levels of agricultural productivity. In fact, as a result of many factors, poverty in the communal areas increased markedly in both extent and depth, reaching alarming levels during the 1990s. The mainstream government water programmes have been based on community boreholes or deep wells. Although some are used to water vegetable gardens, there has never been more than a passing interest in providing water for productive uses. Instead, under the responsibility of a different ministry, the approach has been to build capital-intensive formal irrigation schemes, with water supplied from dams. By 1999 the total number of beneficiaries of these formal irrigation schemes were no more than 20,000 households, or 2% of the total number in the communal areas. [authors abstract]