By: Mining review Africa

As South Africa grapples with a national water crisis marked by ‘Day Zero’ warnings in all regions and ageing infrastructure nationwide, a new model for resource resilience is emerging from the country’s mining heartlands.

In the Northern Cape, water is not a given. It is a negotiation between rainfall and demand, industry and community, between today’s needs and tomorrow’s survival. It is in this context that Anglo American’s Kumba Iron Ore have built an ambitious water stewardship approach.

The results are tangible: up to 80% of water used across Kumba’s mines is recovered through advanced technologies, thousands of rural residents have reliable clean water, and local municipalities can plan and manage their systems independently.

Around Kolomela mine specifically, innovative water solutions have been developed in partnership with local municipalities to address the particular challenges of the local catchment. The operation also contributes to the regional water supply scheme through diversion of surplus water volumes and treats and reuses effluent from the Gamagara Municipality wastewater works for plant operations – turning a municipal challenge into a shared resource.

In the Joe Morolong Municipality, Sishen mine completed a major upgrade to the bulk water scheme serving the villages of Sesipi, Perth, Kome, and Tsiloane. The R11 million project refurbished nine boreholes, installed two booster pumps, and delivers an average of 480 kilolitres of clean water every day to more than 6,000 residents.

The engineering choices made here are designed with sustainability in mind. Nine boreholes are primarily solar-powered, with Eskom connections retained as backup. Construction followed the Department of Water and Sanitation’s design criteria for rural community water supply, embedding the project within the national regulatory framework from the outset.

This is infrastructure designed not just for today, but for the life of the communities it serves. “The hydrology of this region demands precision, discipline and long-term thinking.”

“Our efforts within the operations and host region are always guided by and in line with our vision to support safe, compliant and adaptive mining underpinned by operational excellence and collaborating initiatives that drive water stewardship,” says Hamilton Moswathupa, Specialist Hydrogeology and Water Management at Kumba. “Our water recovery rates reflect rigorous science and continuous improvement – directly reducing pressure on shared water sources that communities and ecosystems both depend on.”

While physical infrastructure can be built in months, however, the institutional capacity to maintain, manage and improve it takes years. This is the gap that Anglo American’s Municipal Capability and Partnership Programme (MCPP) was designed to close.

Operating in the Tsantsabane and Gamagara local municipalities – the two municipalities where Kumba’s mines are located – the MCPP partners with the Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs and the CSIR to build genuine municipal capability.

The results are measurable. In Tsantsabane, Blue Drop water quality compliance scores rose from 0% to 56% for the Postmasburg scheme, and in Gamagara from 11% to 54.71% across all its schemes. Municipal teams that once depended entirely on external contractors to maintain boreholes are now doing so themselves, guided by groundwater management plans and standard operating procedures they developed in-house.

The programme’s alignment with the Cape Town Declaration on Africa water investments places it squarely within the continent’s emerging consensus on what water resilience requires: not just infrastructure, but the enabling environments and governance systems that allow infrastructure to function over time.

“You can’t separate a mine from its catchment,” says Musa Jack, MCPP programme manager at Anglo American. “We share the same water, the same risks, the same consequences. Our sustainability approach is to protect, preserve and restore water catchments to support resilient operations, communities and the environment. The MCPP exists because we take that seriously and partner with local stakeholders to address challenges.”

What makes this water story compelling is not any single initiative – it is the coherence between them. Advanced recovery technology reduces industrial demand. Infrastructure investment extends supply to under-served communities. Governance programmes ensure that both are sustained beyond the life of any individual project or mine.

Together, these three pillars align with South Africa’s National Water and Sanitation Master Plan, which identifies mining regions as critical pressure points in the national water system – and calls for exactly this kind of integrated, partnership-based response.

“The measure of this work isn’t what happens while we’re here. It’s what happens after we leave,” says Jack. “It’s part of Anglo American’s longstanding commitment to responsible mining as an enabler for sustainable development of our communities and the country.”