Hon House Chair, hon members, Deputy Minister, members of the portfolio committee, all our distinguished guests in the House, ladies and gentlemen, we as Water Affairs remain very committed to be focused on ensuring that water availability is not a constraint to economic development, which our country desperately needs.
The National Development Plan reiterates the scarcity of water in our country and the need to come up with creative water management programmes that will ensure water security in South Africa. Our response to this challenge as a department as well as the water sector was consolidated in the water conservation programme that I will outline in my speech. Starting immediately with that, as you know, in the last financial year the department took water conservation to a higher level. We developed water conservation strategies for domestic, agricultural, mining and industry use.