If Sizeni Dlamini makes R300 from a day’s trade in second hand clothing and shoes, she’ll dip into it to buy basic groceries A bit more, and she’ll add a few more things to the food basket on her way home. More still, and she’ll replenish her business’s stock. Picture: Leonie Joubert
No work, no pay.
No one knows this better than Sizeni Dlamini. She’s been selling second-hand clothes and shoes from her patch at Warwick Junction, beneath an overpass in Durban’s inner city, for 16 years. If it rains, passers-by dash through the usually bustling market. Who’s going to stop to browse soggy clothing, and likely get soaked through?
Same in the heat.
“People just pass by,” the 55-year-old says. “They don’t have time to stand in the sun and choose clothes. It would be much better if we had shelter.”
Call her what you will — micro-business operator, entrepreneur, street trader — but Dlamini’s isn’t the kind where she can close the shop door when it’s a scorcher, even if trade is down.
The recent summer was pretty grim, even for someone like her, whose body is acclimatised to the notoriously muggy East Coast weather where the warm Indian Ocean puts plenty of water vapour into the air, pushing up the discomfort levels and health risks on hotter days.
“It was really bad,” she recalls.
Durban didn’t experience any formal heatwave conditions this summer, according to climatologists — for that, the city would need to register temperatures of 34°C or higher for three days or more — but people were nevertheless exposed to dangerously hot weather at times. The most sweltering day came in early autumn: the Ballito weather station, about 50km north of the inner city, registered a maximum of 33°C on 20 March. With the humidity reaching 62%, the felt temperature would have been 45°C, well into the range for developing symptoms of heat exhaustion for those not able to find ways to shelter from the heat.
But densely built-up inner city areas like Warwick Junction are heavily tarred, paved and concreted over. Surfaces like this trap heat, making conditions in these heat islands 5°C to 10°C hotter than a city’s leafier outskirts.
Women feel the heat more acutely than men, and are more likely to be hurt by income loss because of it. It’s partly their body’s make-up — women don’t shed heat through sweating as efficiently as men do, so will experience health impacts at a lower threshold than men — but also because many work in lower-paying and informal heat-exposed jobs, such as farming, street trading, garment making, or care work, according to the US-based non-profit HERA. The organisation recognises the greater risk that lower-income and self-employed women face because of extreme heat, both to their health, and their income, and works in various Global South countries to help them become more heat-resilient.
The first line of defence for traders who are exposed to the elements in this way, local occupational health expert from the University of KwaZulu Natal professor Rajen Naidoo says, is to put in heat-buffering solutions — think in terms of shelter, water, and rest — with the city responsible for most of the necessary infrastructure.
Once that’s in place, though, a novel form of income protection insurance might be something that could encourage women to shut up shop during the worst of a heat event, without fear of her family going hungry.
Bathroom breaks
“This is the piss wall,” says Patrick Ndlovu, cheeks dimpling with humour as he points out the face-brick wall with its makeshift urinal along a stretch of pavement not far from the stall holders.
Hand-sprayed lettering barks a command to passers-by in isiZulu. The sentence is poetic and gritty: two layers of paint, florid green over black; some ee cummings flare to the grammar, which doesn’t bother with capital letters.
There’s no polite way to tell the urinal’s users that this is no place for solids.
“If you defecate here,” Ndlovu translates delicately, “if caught, you will be compelled to take it away.”
The wall is topped with coils of barbed wire and some medieval-looking spikes overlooking a riot of off-duty minibus taxis getting soaped down on the pavement.
At first glance, these facilities look pretty grim. The air is thick with the smell of urine being alchemised into vapour in the mid-morning heat. The two 25-litre water containers — each with a shoulder cut away to create a pee bucket — are working overtime. One’s overflowing, the other’s getting there. But it’s much better than it used to be, according to Ndlovu, who is the co-founder of the urban renewal non-profit Asiye eTafuleni. The organisation has been working here for nearly two decades, supporting informal traders to know their rights and legitimise their place in the city’s economy.
At a most practical level, that means sorting out the lavatory situation.
Warwick Junction’s broken-down municipal toilet block has been barred and bolted for six years, with the city giving no indication of why it hasn’t been repaired, or if it will be. For the many thousands of people who pass through this rabbit warren daily, or ply their trade in and around the market, this means that when their bladders call, they have little option but to go al fresco.
This is easier said than done if you’re a woman, which matters during summer. Many women traders say they hold back on drinking water during the day because they don’t want to have to deal with the inevitable consequences.
This will lead to dehydration. When the body’s heat-stressed, it puts extra strain on the kidneys, leaving the body’s clean-up system overloaded with salts and toxins but with too little water to do the job. The upshot: higher risk of urinary tract infection, but also longer-term kidney damage.
In principle, a key solution to a heat-resilient trading community here is simple: get clean drinking water coming in, and black water flushing out. In a sentence: restore the municipal ablution block.
The eThekwini municipality did not respond to a request for clarity on why the public amenities at Warwick Junction aren’t working, why they haven’t been repaired, or if there are plans to do so.
Until such a time, Ndlovu and his team have been experimenting with low-cost outdoor urinals, knocked together from materials you can pick up at a local hardware store — PVC piping, wooden planks, buckets, shade cloth. Men, at least, have a discrete nook to relieve themselves. They’re asked to pay R2 for the convenience, but no sweat if they can’t, says Ndlovu.
But what about the women?
There’s a nondescript plywood walk-in booth near Dlamini’s clothing stall. It’s the size of an average wardrobe, and the only thing telling a passer-by that it’s the women’s facility is the universal sign on the door: a stick-figure illustration of a person in a dress.
There’s no comfortable sit-down loo with flushing water inside, or even a dry-toilet system. But it’s a private, dignified place for a woman to relieve herself over a small bucket, the contents of which she’ll toss down the nearest storm water drain.
The next step is to recruit what the Asiye eTafuleni team calls urine entrepreneurs — most likely people living rough in the neighbourhood who are keen to make a bit of cash — to empty the urinal buckets into nearby stormwater drains for a small fee.
It’s one small part of the shade-water-rest triage that’s necessary to make these traders more heat-resilient in an ever hotter world.
“Back in five minutes”
Besides drinking plenty of water during hot weather, traders like Dlamini should do one more thing that they’re not likely to: take a break.
Because: no work, no pay.
But what if they have income protection insurance that paid out if conditions get hot enough — dangerous enough— that they need to close their stalls for a few hours? Allowing them to stay safe without foregoing the food they need to put on the table that night.
HERA is piloting something like this in India, Sierra Leone, Pakistan, Thailand and the USA, using philanthropic money, buy-in from local insurance companies, and small premiums paid by traders. Founder and CEO Kathy Baughman McLeod reckons it could work for Warwick Junction traders, too.
“Women in a market in Freetown, Sierra Leone, lose 60% of their income to heat,” says Baughman McLeod. “Whether that’s their own illness, if foot traffic is down, or (when their stock) has gone bad.”
For the price of roughly one day’s takings — in Sierra Leone, that’s around R130; for Dlamini, it might be R200 — the woman will get paid out the equivalent of a day’s earnings for every day that conditions are hot enough to be recognised as dangerous. It’s an index-based insurance, meaning they’re guaranteed to get a paid out purely on the basis of a heat event occurring. No site-visits or assessments to verify the impact of the heat event.
The threshold temperature that triggers a heat-event payout is site-specific.
For traders like those in Durban, this could be calculated based on the city’s own weather station data — it has several — and satellite imagery. Given the Warwick traders operate in an urban heat island, the trigger temperature would need to be calculated to accommodate that, too. Ideally an on-site weather station would give the most accurate measurements of temperature and humidity in the market complex. Some of the HERA pilot initiatives are also drawing on biometric data from traders themselves, using digital fitness trackers which allow a correlation between weather data and the physical markers of women’s heat stress.
The current insurance structure is event-based. Once a triangulation of different weather data registers that the trigger temperature has been reached, the insurance company partners will guarantee the payout, usually within 10 days or less.
“But we want to go to forecast-based payouts,” says Baughman McLeod. “If we know it’s going to be hot and humid, and the trigger (conditions) are predicted for, say, five days from now, then half or all of the payout (will be made) in advance. The trigger is the forecast, not the actual event.”
A forecast-based approach would also give women early warning of an approaching extreme event so they can plan stock purchases, make alternate childcare arrangements, and change their operating hours.
Making a plan
The income insurance isn’t a silver bullet, says Baughman McLeod. The heat resilience triage needs to start with heat-buffering solutions — think in terms of shelter, water, and rest — with the city responsible for most of the necessary infrastructure and various social protections.
The eThekwini municipality says it recognises heat stress as a pressing issue. It has various climate-focused plans, strategies and working groups in place, and has a range of partnerships such as with the World Resources Institute and the C40 Cool Cities network which aim to coordinate climate responses. Although it’s unclear what the timelines are for these solutions materialising in this part of the inner city.
Until such a time as the city brings the shelter, water, and resting options, the old South African maxim — ’n boer maak ’n plan — is alive and well amongst these stallholders. Thandazile Nyathi sells beef and chicken braaied over open coals at her stand not far from Dlamini’s clothing stall. BBQ sauce, shisanyama spice, plain salt, curry. Loads of sides — rice, phuthu (a stiff porridge from maize meal), beans, spinach, samp, cabbage.
She trades from a makeshift shelter on a pavement where taxis roar past nearby. Her work-around for not having a fridge?
“You buy your food in the morning, and sell it all in one day,” she says.
Nomusa Luthuli has some beach brollies that she puts up over her fruit stand when the sun gets hot and high. Soft fruits, like today’s plums, go pap quickly in the heat. Her solution: a repurposed 500ml cool drink bottle, with a few holes punctured on one side, makes a sprinkler system. A few squirts every now and then to cool things down, and her stock will likely have of a longer life.
This article is from Story Ark – tales from southern Africa’s climate tipping points, an award-winning collaboration with the Stellenbosch University School for Climate Studies, Henry Nxumalo Foundation, and the Pulitzer Center.