South Africa: Umgeni water boss urges training for jobless engineers
19 September 2012
NEPAD Water Centres of Excellence: CYRIL Gamede, the new CE of Umgeni Water, says there are enough engineers in South Africa and perceptions of shortages have arisen because employers do not want to train up newly qualified engineers.
Mr Gamede, who took up his position at South Africa’s second-biggest bulk water utility on August 20, is also the president of the Engineering Council of South Africa and was an operations director at Umgeni from 1996 to 2002.
Umgeni’s main customer is eThekwini municipality, but it also supplies water to the north and south KwaZulu-Natal coastal regions and to Msunduzi municipality. It supplies 426-million cubic metres of potable water to six municipal customers and is about a third the size of South Africa’s biggest water utility, Rand Water.
Umgeni has a programme of providing experience for newly qualified engineers by letting them work on the utility’s capital projects.
Category: Water