Analysis of social acceptance of rural Solar Water Heater projects in South Africa

This study uses Principal Component Analysis to investigate the key determinants of social acceptance for a Solar Water Heater projects in South Africa, using a case study approach. The study area is located in QwaQwa, an area that was set up as a Sotho homeland during the apartheid era. Ordinal data were collected through a questionnaire survey and analysed statistically using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). The survey was administered on 364 households that were randomly sampled from a population of 6,475 households that benefited from the project. Computer generated random number tables were used in the sampling. The level of confidence of the study was 95% while the margin of error was 5%. The objective of the study was to identify the key determinants of the social acceptance of SWH projects in South African rural areas using six variables, including household size, level of education, age of household head, monthly income, level of participation in project, and frequency of water use per week and per day. The results show that nearly 93.7% of the household heads who participated in the survey either agreed or strongly agreed that the Solar Water Heater project has been beneficial to their households, denoting a high level of social acceptance. The results also show that 95.9% of the household heads acknowledged that the Bluegumbosch Solar Water Heater project has improved the livelihoods of the community. The analysis shows that two principal components, PC1 and PC2, account for 53.029% of the total variance, while the variables that are related to frequency of water use reflect the highest centroid mean coordinates, suggesting that they are the underlying variables that exert the greatest influence on the two principal components. The policy implications of these findings suggest that decisions about the design of SWH proects must take into account factors such as the purpose for which local communities use the water, frequency of use- and level of affluence.