South Africa is a world leader in water technology – now we just have to put it into practice

South Africa’s economy is being tossed like a cork in the stormy waters of an unprecedented and violent recalibration of the global economy. Some argue that this is a natural reaction to the adjustment from a uni-polar single superpower world of 20 years ago to the one of multiple centres of power – economic, political and military – we have today.

This is backed up by a series of global indicators. Let us begin with the Global Competitiveness Index (GCI) 2018 which ranks South Africa at 67^th out of 137 countries. The impressive 31^st place when considering that the country’s market sophistication is balanced out by the dismal 114^th place with respect to Human Capital in the index.

A key driver of a successful economy in the 21^st Century is innovation. This is the key competence to navigate the risks of a highly competitive global economy while taking advantage of the all too few opportunities in a depressed international economic environment.

One of those structural faults has to be the very weak industrialisation ecosystem that is punitive to potential “sunrise industries”. We continue to produce an impressive list of innovations and inventions produced by super-talented South Africans who have been forced to industrialise and produce elsewhere in the world. We then concomitantly lose out on an opportunity to reverse the patterns on our technology balance of payments and in turn our export deficit.

The state of human capital is the primary concern though. The WEF Global Human Capital Report (2017) puts the country at 87^th in the world out of 130 participating counties where we are ranked 65^th on capacity – read educational levels – and 90^th on our track record in the development of the next generation. Given the high emphasis that the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is given, one would expect this to be higher.

The most alarming component is deployment. This is the category that judges skills application in a system. The unemployment numbers, together with that special category of unemployed graduates and diplomates, contribute to our global ranking in this category to a very low 109^th in the world.

Let me offer just three examples, beginning with acid mine water and its very close cousin, highly saline water (including seawater). Traditional desalination technology based on the gold standard reverse osmosis is highly effective but with two fatal flaws. The first is that the processing has a very high energy budget, and second, both the technology and the membranes are very expensive in terms of direct cost and maintenance. The SA Water research community led by the Water Research Commission is working on six lower-energy, lower-cost options that have been proven at laboratory scale and now need investment to complete the journey through pilots and demonstration before they can be used at scale as long-term solutions.

These have the potential to deal with acid mine water in the hotspots of Gauteng, Mpumalanga and KZN as well as provide reasonable options for desalination in the coastal regions. In addition to being a very effective means to deal with a very difficult pollution problem countrywide, it is also a very viable part of a diversified water supply strategy and no one needs reminding of the high scarcity risk in South Africa. Star among these is the homegrown technology of Eutectic Freeze developed by Prof Allison Lewis and her team at UCT.

Another suite is that of the 4IR water-efficiency tools. There is a range of engineering tools, devices and computer-based management tools to increase water efficiency and process optimisation to enable every drop to stretch further. There are tools available for most industry sectors and the research indicates a higher productivity index and, even better, a potential increase in global market share as the world’s markets become much more sensitive to water and other resource costs as part of their buying decisions.

A good example is a computer-based intelligent irrigation scheduling system that has been shown to save 80 million litres of water annually in just one irrigation scheme.

These technologies, together with wastewater reuse on farms, rolled out at scale, will have a huge impact on agricultural water use, and very important, make billions of litres of water available for new agricultural entrants and other users.

The third example is even more exciting. We, like many places in the developing world, have the daunting challenge of meeting the sanitation targets of the Sustainable Development Goals – the goal of ensuring universal access to safe and dignified improved sanitation in just over 10 years. This is an ambitious task given the current global economic climate as well as increasing water scarcity worldwide.

We, through South African ingenuity as well as the partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Reinvent the Toilet programme, have access to a range of revolutionary products under the banner of “New Sanitation” to solve this problem.

The genius does not stop there, however.

South Africa is a key player in the global sanitation research and innovation network within which the exploration of beneficiated products from human waste is very advanced. The products include energy all the way from first-stage processing as bio-char to bio-gas capture to liquid fuels and high-calorie product extraction. This, combined with high-value lipids, proteins and specialist chemicals will make us look at human waste is a completely different light in the near future.

Innovative business support models are required from social franchising interventions for micro-enterprises on the one hand to classical industrialisation strategies on the other. Key to this is the buying power of the state. If government becomes the first adopter of these new knowledge-based products, the base demand would be sufficient to encourage investment into these “Sunrise Sectors” and encourage the uptake of these new products and services.

The second key contribution is the development of the standards and regulatory environment to mitigate the potential risks to the consumer and society. The third leg is using the acclaimed high-market sophistication of South Africa to move our preferences to higher resource-efficiency sustainable products and solutions that encourage a lower carbon budget economy. These solutions will not only deal with the many service delivery backlogs and mitigating our pollution risks – if industrialised innovatively, they have the real possibility of turning South Africa’s economic fortunes around swiftly and sustainably.

Dhesigen Naidoo is CEO of the Water Research Commission