More efficient use of water will be critical to adaptation, and entrepreneurs can play a vital role. Rori Mpete’s company Loo Afrique, for example, is innovating water-saving designs of toilets and urinals in which a basin for hand-washing is positioned over the toilet bowl, so the waste water from handwashing can be used to flush.  

Mpete told South Africa’s Mail & Guardian how he came up with the idea when his grandmother’s wash basin was broken:  

“It was about my fourth visit to the toilet when I said to myself, ‘I can’t be going around the house just to wash my hands; I might as well wash my hands in the cistern… If I can wash my hands in the cistern, it means I save water. Why can’t all South Africans wash their hands in the cistern?’”  

Loo Afrique is one of the enterprises profiled in a series of case studies by TIPS (Trade & Industrial Policy Strategies), a South African research institution. Another is WIS Group, which provides water management services such as storage, greywater recycling, and innovative leak detection software.

Like many new entrepreneurs, WIS Group founder Tshego Mpete was motivated by environmental awareness and social conscience – one reason why backing SMEs could potentially have an outsized impact on climate adaptation. She told News24: “I wanted to make an impact in my continent, I wanted to create something that will outlive me, and I wanted to contribute to society at large… If we all understood how limited water is as a resource, we would all treat it differently.” 

In a 2019 report, Small business development in the climate change adaptation space in South Africa, TIPS identify a range of sectors in which small businesses can potentially make a big impact – including energy-efficient air conditioning, microinsurance products for climate-related risks, and new solutions in irrigation, which accounts for almost two-thirds of water use in the country.

Two students of mechanical engineering at the University of Johannesburg, Mogale Maleka and Tumelo Pule, decided to explore hydroponic farming as a more water-efficient way to irrigate crops but found a problem: hydroponic systems rely on constant electricity, and frequent power outages required the use of generators.

So they designed a new kind of pipe system that can keep hydroponic crops irrigated on as little as four hours of electricity supply per day. Their company, AB Farms, claims their system “allows for farming of green leafy crops using 10 times less space [and] up to 90% less water in a virtually pesticide free environment, virtually anywhere”.