The KwaZulu-Natal floods in April took the lives of 443 people and left countless others displaced. Interviews conducted by SECTION27 in the aftermath revealed an inadequate disaster response system that resulted in many flood victims having to endure compromised access to education, healthcare and adequate shelter.
As the waters receded in the wake of the KwaZulu-Natal floods in April 2022, it exposed a lack of coordinated responses by local authorities which left the communities of eThekwini in a more vulnerable state than before the deluge.
The existing vulnerabilities are borne out by the finding that eThekwini has more informal settlements than any municipality in South Africa. Coupled with the observation that at least 164 of the 550 informal settlements are built on floodplains, it was a disaster by design for many. A total of 443 people lost their lives in the floods and countless others have been displaced.
SECTION27 interviewed 18 families, primarily from Ugu, Umlazi and Groutville, whose lives were uprooted by the floods, to assess the impact the floods had on access to basic education and healthcare, and to gain insight into the government’s response before, during and after the disaster.
While we would not suggest that the survey respondents are representative of all of those affected by the floods, the findings are notable and align with other evidence of impacts reported in the media.
Education and health
Across the board, we found that schooling was interrupted for at least two weeks, in some cases up to two months. Of those interviewed by SECTION27, 50% cited damaged roads as the primary reason their children could not get to school. While there were only a few instances of damage to school infrastructure in the survey, the Auditor-General of South Africa, in its first special report on flood relief funding, found that 356 schools in KwaZulu-Natal were damaged by the floods.
Another reason the interviewed parents gave for not returning their children to school was that their uniforms had been washed away in the floods, a finding corroborated by the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) in a briefing to Parliament in September 2022. In response, the Department of Social Development, through the South African Social Security Agency, spent about R3.2-million on 1,231 school uniforms (about R2,600 per uniform), according to a parliamentary report in November 2022. SECTION27 found that by July, 83% of the children of those interviewed had returned to school.
Access to healthcare was equally ...