J-PAL Africa, City of Cape Town and IGC hosted second Urban Economics Research Seminar on water, sanitation and energy

Cape Town, 10 September 2026 — J-PAL Africa's Water, Air and Energy (WAE) Lab, together with the City of Cape Town and the International Growth Centre (IGC), hosted the second Cape Town Urban Economics Research Seminar. The seminar brought together municipal officials, researchers, and partner organisations to share emerging research on water, sanitation and energy, discuss its relevance to Cape Town's policy priorities, and strengthen collaboration between researchers and policymakers in identifying shared questions and solutions.

The seminar is part of an ongoing series reflecting the WAE Lab's partnership with the City of Cape Town, which connects researchers and government counterparts around policy-relevant questions and creates opportunities for rigorous evidence to inform real-world decisions. It followed the first seminar, on Housing, Transport and Public Works, held on 20 August.

Opening the event, the City of Cape Town's Chief Economist Paul Court framed the day's discussions around Cape Town's most pressing service-delivery challenges and the role of rigorous evidence in addressing them.

J-PAL Africa Executive Director Matthew Edmundson then affirmed the value of bringing researchers and City officials together around these questions.

"The process of co-producing rigorous evidence on clean air, safe water, and reliable energy begins with City staff and J-PAL researchers sitting together and agreeing on policy questions that are both relevant and timely. We then work together to design and run randomized evaluations to test what works, and how that can be scaled to reach and improve the lives of Capetonians" Edmundson said.

The seminar was organised around three policy-focused sessions:

Water: pricing a scarce resource without penalising households most at-risk

Cassandra Cole (Postdoctoral Fellow, Geneva Graduate Institute) presented research on the Day Zero drought and found that low-income households barely respond to water prices. A R1 increase in the average price cuts consumption by only around 0.22 percent. Free and discounted water therefore lowered indigent households' bills without driving much extra use, offering redistribution at little cost to conservation. Martine Visser (Professor, UCT) previewed a randomised evaluation of the City's Advanced Metering Infrastructure roll-out, and Emiliano Rinaldi (PhD Candidate, LSE) widened the lens to firms and water-market design. Siya Bashe (Director: Commercial Services, Water and Sanitation, City of Cape Town), the session’s discussant, then explored what the findings mean for tariff and metering policy.

Sanitation: sewers as public-health and climate infrastructure

Molly Lipscomb (Professor, U Virginia), tuning in remotely, asked how the City can target maintenance to prevent blockages rather than react to them. Building on that, Joshua Deutschmann (Senior Research and Policy Lead, DIL, U Chicago), discussed his research that found that sewer coverage substantially reduces the health toll of extreme rainfall. Pump failures during heavy rain were linked to higher rates of diarrhoeal disease, especially among young children, making sewer infrastructure an important form of climate resilience rather than a basic service alone.  The discussion, led by Melissa De Souza (Head: Technical Services, Reticulation Branch, City of Cape Town), turned to where investment would yield the greatest health return, and why the most at-risk communities bear the biggest burden from sanitation challenges.

Energy: the value of reliability and the design of subsidies

Allan Davids (Lecturer, UCT), using Cape Town's split between City-supplied and Eskom-supplied areas, showcased that homes benefitting from electricity supplied by the City, which are less likely to experience load shedding, became thirty to thirty-five percent more valuable. This suggests that  reliable electricity may be a key determinant in household purchases, home valuations, and the formation of affluent neighbourhoods. Kelsey Jack (Professor, UC Berkeley; Co-Chair, J-PAL’s Environment, Energy, and Climate Change sector) evaluated the City's electricity subsidy programme, evidence relevant to the roughly 450 million people who receive such subsidies worldwide. Acting as discussion moderator, Rebecca Cameron (Principal Professional Officer, Energy Directorate) evoked the trade-offs between reliability, affordability and targeting.

Across the discussions, several common themes emerged: the value of the City's administrative and operational data for producing evidence that speaks to real service-delivery decisions; the importance of how policies are designed and targeted, not only how much is spent; and the tendency for the benefits of infrastructure, and the costs of its failure, to fall unevenly across Cape Town's communities. 

Closing the seminar, the City of Cape Town's Paul Court returned to the theme of collaboration, reflecting that reliable data and strong partnerships are the foundation for research that can meaningfully improve policy.

For more information about this work, read about the WAE Lab's partnership with the City of Cape Town.

Partnership contact, J-PAL Africa: Firdous Khan, [email protected]

Media contact, J-PAL Africa: Paul Berthe, [email protected]