Sustainability Indicators for Swaziland

indicators | social | economic | natural resources | institutional

SOCIAL ASPECTS OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT IN SWAZILAND

Poverty | Demographics | Health | Education | Human Settlements

HUMAN SETTLEMENTS

Background

There is currently only a poorly defined human settlements hierarchy in Swaziland.

The Urban Government Act (No. 8), 1969 and Legal Notice 136/1992 provides for the establishment of only three tiers of urban settlement (City Councils, Town Councils and Town Boards) and there appears to be no generally recognized working definition of "urban centre".

As a result, population size (unspecified) tends to be used by the national census to define urban centres, with 13 urban centres enumerated in 1966 and 1976 and 22 centres enumerated in 1986. The 1986 list includes extremely small (by population) centres such as Lavumisa (850) and Mankayane (913). Both of these urban centres are gazetted as Towns, whereas much larger urban centres (for example Big Bend with 9,676 people in 1986) are not gazetted as towns.

Furthermore there are a number of centres on SNL which do act as urban centres with respect to marketing of agricultural inputs and outputs, and yet they are not recognized, either by the Urban Government Act or the national census as urban centres. The MEPD's National Development Plan alludes to the need to designate a number of these as "rural growth centres".

The classification of various tiers of concentration of settlement throughout the country on the basis of a number of indications (population size together with the range of goods and services offered by the centre and the functional role that it plays in relation to its hinterland) would lead to a human settlement hierarchy. The hierarchy would in turn provide the government with a rational decision-making tool for its public sector investment programme of infrastructure and sectoral Ministry spending. It would provide the private sector with a clear picture of which centres are more actively growing than others, and what range of facilities are available for the workforce. Finally it would provide the centres themselves and local leadership with a realistic insight into the potential for growth of different centres, the types of industrial and commercial investment each centre should be promoting as well as the potential that the centre has to facilitate economic development in the hinterland.

This page was last updated on 03 February 2004