The African Water Commons Collective (AWCC) is a collective of water campaigners supporting and collectively learning for mobilising and organising for water justice in and beyond South Africa. We work politically, publicly and collectively against the privatisation of water, and build strategies to fight for water access/justice for all (i.e. the African water commons). We are a women-led feminist collective. From 2014 the Beacon Valley District Branch of the Cape Town Housing Assembly and a community-based initiative of women called Women for Change in a township of Mitchel’s Plain began to mobilise around the implementation of water metres and against water cut offs, that were being installed in increasingly backhanded ways to people in substandard living conditions. Since that time we have developed a workshop series that has been used to map the water needs and uses of communities across the Cape Flats, established door to door work, speak outs, pickets, leafleteering, campaign tables, regular community meetings, and wide networks of international water justice solidarity.
Our main aim is to support self organisation, and mobilising resources for linking water struggles. Our main way of doing this is through supporting the establishment of Water Action Committees (WACs) which can work both autonomously as well as network with other organisations through the AWCC. We provide political education, capacity building, tools, strategies, networking, and other forms of solidarity to build a stronger movement in Cape Town and beyond. We are available and responsive to do training and support work for community members, almost all of whom are women, standing up against the most predatory practices of neoliberal capitalism that deepen poverty, racism, inequality, and sexism in the name of profit and conservation, world wide.
We have made links with water justice activists resisting water privatisation across South Africa and in Mexico, India, Canada, Mozambique, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Palestine, Ireland, USA (Detroit) and Bolivia. In 2017, during the “day zero” drought, we were part of the establishment of the Water Crisis Coalition. In 2018 we consolidate our work across the city of Cape Town and establish a collective specifically aimed at supporting organisation building around water justice and linking small struggles. In 2019 we were part of organising three national level Water Justice Roundtables towards a People’s Plan for Water and supported the Witzenberg Justice Coalition in refusing the 25 million dollar prepaid water metre pilot project earmarked for the Ceres farming area in the Western Cape. In 2020 our network was at the frontlines of struggles for water justice for washing hands, drinking, cleaning, cooking, and growing food for the mass of unemployed residents of Cape Town during the Covid 19 pandemic.
Since 2021 we have been mapping the water needs of the majority and have been active members of the African Ecofeminist Collective, the Western Cape Water Caucus, End Water Poverty, and a number of other climate and anti-capitalist alliances. In 2022, we were part of organising the Alternative World Water Forum in Dakar Senegal and opposing the New Water Meter Policy in Cape Town that is currently putting residents who cannot afford to pay onto a drip system. In 2023, we learnt directly from community-run water systems and alternatives in Colombia, Brazil, and Argentina. We continue to stand in solidarity with Palestine as part of the End Water Apartheid Campaign. Water apartheid anywhere is water apartheid everywhere and so we took the City of Cape Town to task with ten demands for water justice.
In 2024 we took our struggles across the continent with the Africa Water Justice Network to the People’s Water Forum in Indonesia to counter the World Water Forum’s embrace of privatisation and hence of thirst for the poor. There we co-hosted a workshop with the Agitate Collective on “Translating Together Across Borders: Telling Stories to Advance Struggles for the Water Commons.” To do this we used the forthcoming documentary film, Capturing Water, which we are making with movements organising for water around food sovereignty and pollution, directed by Rehad Desai of Uhuru Productions. We also hosted comrades from Kenya in an Africa Water Justice Network Bridging Waters exchange to counter the government to government exchanges which share plans for new policies that open up the continent to the corporatisation of public water services.
We are currently building our campaign Water For Life, developing anti-repression strategies needed in this struggle, doing a power analyses of the corporate take-over of water, and prioritising south-south solidarity dialogues with women on the frontlines of defending water for life across the globe for an internationalist, intersectional, Pan-Africanist struggle for the water commons.
Water Action Committees
Water Action Committees are self-organised communities spread across the City of Cape Town and Witzenberg. Supported by the AWCC these communities have regular meetings and actions to keep out the Water Management Devices aka Weapons of Mass Destruction and to deal with other water and related issues. After a series of workshops and meetings over the years we agreed that a WAC will be 15 people per area. The AWCC then in collaboration with the WAC provides support based on what the community needs in that moment. The aim is to build and empower the WAC so that they can go out and empower the community. The vast majority of Action Committee members are women, and all WAC’s are women-led. This is not surprising given who carries the brunt of the crisis of water in our household and our communities. WAC’s are united by their issues and demands. We do cross-area work and WAC’s are united through the campaign for Water For Life!
There are currently active Water Action Committees in Bishop Lavis, Makhaza, Hillview, Beacon Valley, Woodlands, and Eastridge in Mitchell’s Plain, Elsie’s River, Nyanga, Witzenberg, Capricorn, Belhar, Enkanini in Khayelitsha, Ruyterwacht, Clarke Estate, Military Heights, Hopefield, and from the Voices of Azania Water Action Committee, which works with foreign nationals across Cape Town.
Workshops
As a collective that supports self-organisation, the AWCC believes in Education for Total Liberation. AWCC has developed political education workshops available to organisations or communities interested in joining and expanding the struggle for water justice.
We begin with a three-part AWCC Foundation Workshop:
I.What are the issues/struggles & water mapping.
II.Why do these issues exist & for who?
III.What can we do about it?
We also run workshops on:
- Water and Power: An Introduction to the World of Water & Water Privatisation
- Water Mapping
- Starting a Water Action Committee
- Campaigning
- Women and Water
- Safety and Security
- Telling Our Own Stories to Advance Struggles for the Water Commons
Some AWCC workshop feedback:
“Our water was cut off and it was scary. We were traumatised at the scarcity. AWCC comrades came in with knowledge and gave us hope. We were in a vulnerable situation and they had skills, advice. We set up community meetings and its where we as a community took to the streets to say NO to the water installers. We did not allow any subcontractor for the city into our community. The police would show up and we were manhandled, but we stood firm.”
-Bishop Lavis Water Action Committee member
“It was the beginning of something we didn’t understand. We just knew it was wrong. Whenever something emerged we would call AWCC organisers. We had to constantly fight and the municipality kept coming up with new pamphlets and we needed to realign and so we need to travel here and there and get help, but we managed to stop the devices and to make a plan. Our municipality eventually got 20 tanks in and to this day they are still sitting there undelivered. When we summerise it, it seems like three little points about our struggle but the AWCC work has affected 78 000 people who were suppose to have meters by now and that is because of the AWCC.”
-Witzenberg Justice Coalition
“Your Indigent Grant is rejected because you owe water arrears. They charge people 4000 rands to pay for the meters they install. The City never came in to explain what was going on to us, only the AWCC showed up to explain anything.”
-Bishop Lavis Water Action Committee member
“In Elsie’s River we live in flats. The Municipality comes in with an indaba project to replace steel pipes with plastic pipes that comes with meters. The AWCC helped us, our Water Action Committee, to tell the officials no, wait for us to discuss it and tell people they don’t have to accept the new pipes because now when they leak we are told to call indaba and not the city. So we have managed to keep the meters out.”
-Elsie’s River youth member
“I was shocked, when the meter comes in once, yet you pay for life. I tried to seek answers about why this box does not work and the municipality has sent me from pillar to post. I am an urban farmer and there is no water and it effects our livelihood.”
-Makhaza Water Action Committee member
“They employ our own children to go around to get us to fill in forms and force old grandmothers to sign and they are paid per form they get filled in, but these forms are how they put in meters and rob us. I knew it was wrong when they were putting in meters but AWCC explained all that is behind this meter.”
-Nyanga Water Action Committee member
“Once I had no water for weeks. AWCC is always there for me to know I am not alone. Now I need to learn how to go and assist my neighbours who have no water.”
-Hillview Water Action Committee member
“Popular education is opening up my eyes to the world of water. In the Eastern Cape we went to bury my uncle and we did not have water, so we have to go and pay for water on a truck that fills buckets by the river and sits and waits to hear of a funeral, knowing we need water to host a funeral because you cook outside, and then you must pay so that you can carry out a funeral. We grew up where everyone brought 25L of water to a funeral, but now water is a commodity and everyone is exploiting that and taking advantage of our old parents. So when someone dies you think, how much will we need for the box, how much for the burial and how much for the water”
-Makhaza Water Action Committee member
“Old people come to me and show me these water bills they cannot pay. I am relieved to be here so that when I go back I can tell them something will be done, there are comrades to help you. They are threatened to accept being put on the drip system if they cannot pay these bills. We all sit with our different problems but we all have water problems.”
-Bishop Lavis Water Action Committee member