Water Cannot Be Free 

Biologically, all people are born with the same needs: food, water, and shelter. We call this survival.

Morally, all people are born with a set of inherent values: life, liberty, and property. These are called our Lockean natural rights.

The conceptualisation of modern ‘human rights’ inherits liberal ideas of life and liberty, but it also rests on human dignity, social welfare, and the recognition that certain conditions are necessary for meaningful freedom. In 2015, the United Nations established a landmark project to push society towards universal attainment of core human rights principles: the Sustainable Development Goals. Goal 6, Clean Water and Sanitation, establishes that access to safe water is ‘the most basic human need for health and well-being’. Despite this emphasis, the official goal seeks ‘safe and affordable drinking water for all’ (SDG 6.1).

Affordable water, not free water. This raises a question around the validity of the human rights framework: if a core requirement for human survival comes at a cost (even under ideal UN declarations), how can it be defined as a human right?

In a world with shrinking freshwater resources, where the burden of collection and treatment is becoming a primary source of concern for arid nations, the question of whether water should be treated as an economic commodity or an intrinsic human right is a difficult decision that nations will ultimately face. As the former World Bank president Ismail Serageldin feared in 1995, ‘If the wars of this century were fought over oil, the wars of the next century will be fought over water’. 

Do Rights Imply Free Services?

While it is tempting to idealise service provision under the banner of human rights (a common activist trap that I once believed), nothing is or can be truly free. Our governments operate under a ‘social contract’ – to access certain freedoms, we must give up others. I give up my freedom to speed on local roads, but in return, I can be assured that others will abide by driving laws and stop at red lights. Without surrendering any individual liberties, the idea of righteousness regresses to whoever has the most physical power.

Conceptually, nothing is free. This concept is not restricted to the water space; in fact, other human rights are not automatically free. People pay for food, housing, transport, healthcare, and education-related materials even where rights frameworks recognise access to these goods or services. The right to education does not mean that every textbook, building, and university degree is free. The right to legal representation does not mean that institutional funding is automatically waived. The right to healthcare is constrained by limited, often rationed resources. Just because water is expressed as a human right does not mean that it shouldn’t cost anything.

In an ideal world, there would be limitless water resources, financial capital, and the institutional capacity to ensure universal water access. The difficult economic translation of such policies and the infrastructure required to implement them becomes a source of tension. In the 2002 UN General Comment 15, the human right to water is described as ‘indispensable for human dignity’. As an unenforced document, the motion received little resistance. And yet, while everyone would agree that ‘homelessness is bad’, it is uncommon to see people donate life-changing money to a stranger on the street. The same is true for human rights. Everyone is a cheering advocate until they must divert billions of taxpayer dollars to rebuild leaky pipes in marginalised communities. Few have been willing to invest in the dream of free water allocations. That is, except for South Africa.

The Tragedy of South Africa’s Free Basic Water Policy

During Apartheid, a period of institutionalised racial segregation and discrimination in South Africa, a minority white population held considerable political and economic dominance over the black majority. Post-Apartheid, in the early 1990s, around 14 million South Africans lacked access to adequate water supply services, while 21 million faced sanitation shortages. With previous Apartheid-era legislation assigning ownership of the water to land ownership, racial inequities in housing were directly mirrored across water access. Seeking broad and swift social reform, the South African Government adopted the National Water Act of 1998 and the subsequent Free Basic Water Policy. These first constitutionalised access to sufficient water, before quantifying this amount to a provision of 6 kL/month free water per family. Highly motivated by considerations of human rights, the legislation opens with a line from poet Antije Krog: ‘with water we will wash away the sins of the past’. Free water was seen as a right, an equaliser, and proof of change.

However, the water granted under this Free Basic Water Policy was wholly insufficient for most families. 6 kL/month equates to the minimum threshold set by the World Health Organisation, such that a family of four only has sufficient water for basic survival (drinking, some cooking, and simple washing like bucket bathing). This does not include domestic or recreational activities, nor does it include further hygienic requirements. In comparison, a typical UK family of four uses around 14 kL/month, while a typical US family of four uses upwards of 38 kL/month, especially when indoor usage, appliances, gardens, and outdoor consumption are taken into account. 

For historically marginalised communities, water was often seen as a source of household tension, anxiety, and struggle. The free water provided by the plan was meant to encourage higher consumption while lowering prices. For standard households, the allocation (block) of free water was significantly lower than their typical usage; this resulted in the water acting as a cash lump-sum instead of a real incentive to change behaviour. For low-consumption households who could not afford to go beyond the free threshold, the 6 kL/month required rationing, difficult decisions between sanitation/cooking/cleaning, and reduced standards of living. Counterintuitively, establishing a free water block placed the responsibility of consumption on individuals rather than systems; if you ran out of water, it was due to poor budgeting on your end. 

The economic truth is that water costs money. Extraction, treatment to safe standards, purification, pumping, infrastructure (pipes), sewage lines, maintenance, monitoring, governance, labour, and planned drought resilience all involve high costs. Since water companies must collect wages to stay in business, the market alternative to a free water allocation is to ramp up prices after the 6 kL threshold is breached. As most families used more water than the basic WHO standards, they tapped into the boosted prices, leading to higher water bills than before the Free Basic Water Provision was implemented. This resulted in household water bills rising by around 80% while consumption changed by less than 1%.

Furthermore, many of the most marginalised populations (of which this policy was meant to benefit the most) lived in multi-family households, with far more than four people sharing a singular tap. As a result, the poorest and historically marginalised populations were effectively charged as if they were extractive industries, heightening the pressure on individuals to ration scarce water resources.

In regions of South Africa where the water utility felt that residents would be unable to pay for the increased price jump, prepaid taps were installed. These physical devices switched off water access the moment 6 kL allocation levels were fulfilled, without concern for leakage or timing. The water could switch off at a moment’s notice, forcing families to be hypervigilant about their consumption of every last drop. Despite being economically ‘efficient’, these meters are deemed ‘dehumanising’ by civil societies that disproportionately punish the poor. Prepaid meters, despite being labeled ‘not unconstitutional’ by federal courts, effectively weakened procedural protections, commodified essential resources needed for survival, and cut access without human intervention. Water provision between individuals and governing systems became physically separate to the point that critics deemed this Water Act a continuation of the inequalities from Apartheid. 

Water insecurity under this policy disproportionately affected women and people without formal housing. Culturally, in South Africa, women are primarily responsible for the household management of water and sanitation; internalising the limited water granted under the National Water Act led to chronic psychological distress (anxiety, shame, fear), risk of gender-based violence, and limited menstrual hygiene. Communities living in rural or informal housing communities lacked the reliable infrastructure needed to collect their free water, meaning that only those with established pipe connections (often wealthier urban families) benefited under the legislation. Intersectional identities exacerbated tensions, as women living in regions lacking infrastructure were tasked with the physically and emotionally taxing burden of water provision.

Broadly, the core principles of the National Water Act and the Human Right to Water are supported by South Africans. 80% of women from Dzimauli villages believed in their ‘right to water’, meant for all South Africans regardless of settlement urbanicity. Despite widespread failures in local service delivery, neglect towards critical infrastructure, and rampant inequality, families that benefit from the free water (essentially a cash transfer) note its benefits. Conceptually, the ideals of free water hold strong. Implementation-wise, not in this case.

As of now, the National Water Act is still in force, but is undergoing its most significant review in over a decade. Proposed reforms to the bill aim to strengthen protections for water sources, ensure more equitable water allocation, and enhance enforcement capabilities. While the South African Government continues to maintain the National Water Act and Free Basic Water policy, both systems are under serious pressure due to physical water scarcity, infrastructure failures, financial constraints, and efforts for reform.

Why Not Just Increase the Amount of Free Water?

You may be wondering, as I initially did, why the South African government doesn’t simply increase the amount of water freely allocated to each family. 6 kL is insufficient; maybe 20 kL would be enough. This, however, is not the case.

The core problem with South Africa’s National Water Act is how the policies ignore the context of how water is allocated and valued, how people are dispersed, and how sociopolitical factors influence which groups have access. In the battle for human rights against longstanding injustice, the economic reality and historical legacy of Apartheid are not adequately considered. Simply giving families more water does not build treatment infrastructure for rural communities pushed by Apartheid to the outskirts of cities. Prepaid meters continue to push the burden of water provision to individual consumption. Larger households and informal settlements struggle with high price jumps after the free water block has been used up, thereby exacerbating the challenge of water stress.

A blanket gift of any amount of free water does not suddenly erase decades of systemic inequality, uneven resource allocation, and marginalisation, as much as good intentions will it to do so.

Scarcity Economics and Invisible Infrastructure

Water, especially in a world marked by climate change and population growth, is finite and unevenly distributed. Pricing mechanisms may discourage waste, create a cultural signal of scarcity, be utilised to provide infrastructure, and allocate a limited supply. However, this does not mean that privatisation of water markets without consideration for intrinsic human rights is a panacea to water crises. A purely economic approach may price poor families out of survival, lead to the implementation of dehumanising prepaid meters, and prioritise shareholder dividends ahead of updating essential infrastructure. Simultaneously, a rights-based governmental approach that does not correct historical inequalities only perpetuates marginalisation through water access. 

As piping systems are usually buried deep underground and taps are expected to be reliable, most decay is invisible. People notice failures in water systems when pipes burst, reservoirs dry, and public health outbreaks become scandals. In South Africa, the free water provision unraveled leaking infrastructure and gaps in customer access based on socioeconomic disparities.

Free water, as a human rights statement alone, is regressive as it ignores the marginalised communities the policy is meant to serve most; communities historically marginalised by gender/class/race, geographically isolated, and informally housed. Providing households with free water does not promote increased consumption or reduced household bills; instead, the financial reality of infrastructure needs expands the monetary burden on the poorest families. If water were naturally self-delivering, 2.1 billion people would not lack access to safely managed drinking water.

At the end of the day, water access is not an accounting challenge. It is a systemic struggle shaped by history, infrastructure, geography, class, gender, and political will. A household does not run out of water simply because it has mismanaged its allowance; it runs out because states have systematically decided where pipes are built, which neighbourhoods are serviced, how scarcity is priced, and who suffers the consequences when failures occur. 

‘Free water’ is such a seductive but incomplete promise. Water falls from the sky, but safe, treated, piped water goes through a series of steps to arrive at a tap. These costs do not vanish when governments declare water to be free; they are shifted into municipal debt, ignored infrastructure, rationing, high tariffs after the free block, and the bodies of those forced to collect and conserve every last drop. South Africa’s experiment with free basic water shows the danger of mistaking moral declarations with material realities. The failure was not the belief that water is a human right, but rather that a fixed free allowance could undo household overcrowding, the exclusion of informal settlements, and gendered water labour structures. 

When water is priced only as a commodity, the poor are asked to buy their own survival. If it is declared free without the infrastructure and governance to sustain it, the poor are still the first to suffer when taps run dry and meters shut off. The question, then, is not whether water should be a (free) right or a commodity. It is how societies can protect the right to water while paying for the systems that make that right a reality.