Moving Forward: Focus on East Africa

Queue at a water point in Kibera, Nairobi. Source: ASA

Although its title indicates a wider remit, this blog has focussed almost exclusively on East Africa and on the informal settlements that exist in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. In this post I want to draw on  Crow and Dill's (2014) paper to explore some recent events in the water governance of these cities and to consider how they relate to my recent thoughts on the inclusion of community actors.

It appears that in the wake of Dar es Salaam's privatisation fiasco its new water body, DAWASCO, has recognised the importance of community strategy for supplying the city's extensive unplanned settlements. Its initial attempt to bring the Hanna Nassif community into governmental discussions as a development actor proved to be a success. But it was difficult to supervise and as such they have since moved on to Water User Associations (WUAs). This new model is based on a similar principle to that discussed in an earlier post, and may fall foul of the same criticisms highlighted by Jaglin (2002).

In Nairobi two schemes have been attempted to extend water and sanitation access in informal settlements. The first, Maji Bora Kibera, sought to regularise the activities of water vendors operating in the city's biggest slum. It had initial success, bringing together 80% of the vendors in an agreement that would see bills paid, leaks reported and corrupt connections with utility plumbers severed. However, in late 2007 the association broken down when the Nairobi police force carried out a series of disconnections across the settlement.

The second scheme discussed by Crow and Dill is a community-based pipe extension project which took its inspiration from a previous project in Kisumu. Whilst reasonable success had been achieved in Kisumu, in Nairobi's Mkuru settlement the incumbent water traders soon gained control of the 'community groups' that were intended to be in charge of the water supply.

These recent proceedings in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi hold great relevance to the discussion which has been taking place on this blog. They indicate that there is a movement towards acknowledging the importance of community actors in the water supply of urban areas, but that this movement faces some clear challenges. Not least is that of handing power to the community and ensuring, through sufficient oversight, that the right people benefit. 

The many faces of privatisation

Vendor collects water in jerrycans in Mathare, Nairobi. Source: eNCA.

In my previous post I outlined how privatisation comes in many shapes and sizes. For K'Akumu (2004) the question is whether any of these shapes or sizes will really work for the urban poor in Kenya. In developing an answer the author discusses the value of regulation, contractual clauses and social tariffs. But most interestingly of all, he writes about the potential of alternative water suppliers.

As we have seen from the outset private water vendors in East Africa are on the up and up. These entrepreneurs make a profit by extracting water where a piped supply exists and distributing it to areas in which one does not. Whilst their prices are high, the quality of their water tends to be good (Kjellén 2000) and, most importantly, they will deliver to the informal settlements which the state and large private utilities will not.

Despite the growing significance of these vendors as part of the urban water mix they receive very little in the way of support. In fact, Kenya's 2002 Water Act served to inhibit their operations (K'Akumu 2004). In much of the literature they they are described as an interim solution. A stop gap whilst the piped network is extended. But in light of Richard Taylor's comment that many African countries are unlikely to get piped networks equivalent to those in London or New York, maybe we need to reconsider their role. Maybe, as Allen et al. (2006) argue small-scale solutions such as local distributors and groundwater wells are going to become increasingly important parts of the urban water supply.

Informing the debate: some literature on privatisation

The private sector has reared its head in various ways through my blog posts so far, but until this week I had not read much of the broader literature on the subject. Having now done so, I wanted to share some of my insights and reflect on the role of the private sector in improving water access.

To begin with I want to point out that the privatisation of a water supply is not one single strategy. Instead it encompasses a whole range of approaches from short-term service contracts through to full divestiture. In Africa one important distinction is that between the French model of privatisation, which works through leasing arrangements, and the British model which involves the transferal of asset ownership to a private entity (Pierce 2015).

The next thing to note is that the success or failure of a privatisation initiative has a great deal to do with the context in which it takes place (Bayliss 2003). As we saw in my last post City Water failed to make good of that which was left behind by DAWASA. But in Cote d'Ivoire privatisation proved hugely successful and only began to falter as the country's wider economic circumstances changed in 2002. Further examples of this relationship abound and can be found in Bayliss' article.

A related point, but one worthy of individual mention, is that privatisation will only work with due oversight and regulation on behalf of the government (Golooba-Mutebi 2012). A large part of the success in Cote d'Ivoire was down to a social tariff which ensured the provision of water to those who could not afford the going market rate. While such forms of regulation are necessary they can be difficult to implement given the lack of competition amongst private companies to provide the service (Bayliss 2003).

The fourth and final point I want to make is that innovation, either in the form of the cross-subsidies mentioned above, or the participatory action outlined in an earlier post, rarely come from the private sector (Hall and Lobina 2007). Instead these ideas emerge from the public sphere -- from communities, authorities and political activity.

The conclusion then, as much as I can offer one at this stage, is that privatisation alone is not a solution (Carter and Danert 2003). That what is needed is a combination of private sector participation, government regulation and community initiatives. More on this next time!

The failure of privatisation in Dar es Salaam

Dar es Salaam before dusk. Source: Wikipedia

In my last post I discussed how private vendors have responded to a dilapidated water network in Tanzania’s second city. In the days since I have done a bit more digging into the recent history of water reform in Dar es Salaam and the results are quite revealing. 

It appears that the failure of the piped network has not gone unnoticed. In the early 2000s it was recognised that fewer than 100 thousand households were connected in a city of 2.5 million people (Action Aid). The World Bank and IMF were pushing heavily for DAWASA (the management body at the time) to be superseded by a private utility. 

The outcome was that City Water took control in 2005 and a series of mass disconnections and price hikes ensued. Unprofitable areas of the city were handed over to NGOs and the consortium set about doing… well, not a lot as it happens. There were no improvements made to the piped supply, the water quality declined and the government saw none of the lease fee which had been agreed. In the same year as the contract began City Water's top three executives were branded ‘undesirable migrants’ and told to leave the country (see Guardian article). 

To take the above as illustrative of all privatisation efforts would be a step too far. But a story such as this certainly doesn't seem to cast a neoliberal approach in good light. As the Water Aid analysis concludes 'Governance cannot be substituted by a contract'. 

Drawing comparisons in Dar es Salaam

Transporting water by bicycle. Source: All Africa

Inspired by Stine’s engagement with Kjellén’s (2000) paper, I thought I would give it a read for myself. Having been to Dar es Salaam a few years ago I wanted to take the opportunity to learn a bit more about its water situation and reflect on any similarities it might have with the other urban areas that I have considered so far. 

Kjellén’s paper kicks off with a really interesting analysis of Dar’s physical water resources, a rare find in the literature on urban water. By revealing that the city’s physical water supplies are plentiful she gives evidence to an idea that has emerged in much of the literature that I have consulted so far. That is, that the problems here are political and not hydrological. That in Dar es Salaam, as elsewhere, a great deal of the challenge in terms of access derives from a horribly neglected secondary water supply. 

As appears to be the norm, the gap in supply is filled by private water vendors. These entrepreneurial individuals access water where the piped network is available, either legally or illegally (as was noted in Kibera) and then sell it on at a profit to those with no supply of their own. Something that was new to me in Kjellén’s account was that vendors in Dar es Salaam readily transport water around the city by bicycle, charging up to five times as much for a delivery as they would for someone ‘waiting at the tap’. 

For Kjellén private vendors are an ‘interim’ solution, a pop-up industry that has filled the gap whilst pipe issues are resolved. But with their presence clearly persisting into the early stages of the 21st century (see Ayalew et al. 2013) a number of questions begin to emerge. For instance, what has the growth of private vendors meant for the likelihood of piped network reform? Or, how does their existence relate to the neoliberal forms of governance that I discussed in my last blog? I hope to begin to address these in my next few blogs as I focus in on the issues of privatisation and independent water providers. 

Privatisation, participation and potable water

Mathare valley slums, Nairobi. Source: Thomas Mukoya / Reuters

Neoliberal reform has had a marked impact on Africa and on the wider global south. The 1980s saw structural adjustment programmes by the World Bank and IMF intent on opening up the domestic markets of developing countries to global trade (see Cammack 2004). The outcome has been an extension of market doctrine and, as regards water in the urban environment, the idea that the consumer must always pay. 

It’s the concern of Jaglin’s (2002) article that in those parts of SSA where consumers can’t stump up the cost, participatory action has become the key mechanism of cost recovery. That is to say that where they cannot afford to pay in full, individuals and user groups are made to carry out infrastructure maintenance, local network enhancements and management system improvements by themselves (see my last blog on Kisumu for a groundwater-based example).

At first glance this might seem a clever way to ensure that the poor aren’t left behind in a market-orientated economy. However, participatory action carries with it some quite considerable drawbacks. Of the two that I will mention here, the first is that it places the responsibility for infrastructural improvements at the feet of the people who have the least means to carry them out. Where a tax based system might be used to ensure equitable access across an urban area, participatory measures can only serve to entrench inequalities. 

The second, and related, criticism is that participatory action encourages a continued reliance on informal resellers and networks, as opposed to the extension of better quality services to low income neighbourhoods. Whilst unpiped supplies have some recognised benefits (see Solo 1999), they tend to result in less potable water and associated problems with sanitation (see blog here). 

I hope that this post has provided some insights into the relationship between one of the main development theories and the problems of urban water access in Africa. If anyone wants to dig deeper into this topic Jaglin’s paper is definitely worth a look! 

Groundwater, growth and governance: water access in Kisumu

Typical plot in Manyatta. Source: Sustainable Sanitation Alliance Flickr

Kisumu is Kenya’s third largest city and the heart of life on Lake Victoria. Much like Kibera, its history has been closely affected by Kenya’s colonial past. The lifting of restrictions on rural-urban migration in 1963 saw the city’s population grow five-fold in twenty years. Such rapid demographic change placed demands on the city’s water resources that could not be met by the municipal council. 

In Drangert et al’s (2002) paper, on which much of this post is based, the authors note that the local authorities struggled to maintain the city’s piped network, and that it soon began to decline in much the same way as the supplies of those cities studied in DWII. It appears that in the years since water provision has been privatised with a view to improving its commercial viability (see KIWASCO). 

With the deterioration of the piped network local residents turned to the ground beneath their feet to make up the shortfall. By 1999 over 379 hand-dug wells had emerged in the peri urban areas of Manyatta and Migosi, supplying an estimated 664,000 m3/year through local kiosks and vendors.

The immediate question that arises is that of sustainability. MacDonald et al (2012) argue that there is an insufficient availability of high-yielding boreholes in Africa for the predication of rapid urbanisation based on groundwater supplies. However, evidence from MacDonald and Davies (2000) suggests that yields upwards of 5 m3/day are often encountered in fractured basement geology of the type present in Manyatta and Migosi. For perspective the average reported daily abstraction per well in these areas as of 2014 is 0.76m3 and 0.81m3, respectively (see Okotto et al 2015). 

Potential contamination hazards for water in hand-dug wells. Source: Stirling Conservation Science

The other crucial factor here is sanitation. As the above diagram demonstrates there are many risks to the safety of water abstracted from hand-dug wells. One key threat, as mentioned briefly last week, is that of seepage from non-flushing toilets. Drangert et al recognise one possible solution to this in the existence of local “water communities”, groups who are coming together to develop piped networks deriving from the boreholes in their areas. These initiatives could lead to greater standards of hygiene and sanitation, although there is no guarantee that they would result in reduced source contamination. 

Water sources, hygiene and sanitation in East Africa

In this blog I want to discuss something I have mentioned only fleetingly so far, the relationship between water accessibility and the health of Africa’s urban population. Following Tumwine et al. (2002) I am going to focus on three crucial determinants of the incidence of diarrhoea in East Africa: the type of water source, the quantity of water available and the provision of sanitation facilities. 

Relationship between water source and diarrhoea prevalence. Source: Tumwine et al. (2002)

The above graph indicates the relationship between the type of water source used and the prevalence of diarrhoea — the cause of over 20% of child mortality in Kenya (see here). Surface water is the worst, and within this category static reservoirs and ponds appear to be more likely to result in sickness than springs and seeps. Vendors emerge as the safest source of water. However I think it’s important to point out, in light of Howard et al’s (2002) findings, that it is not unknown for vendors to make use of surface water supplies themselves! 

The next issue is the actual quantity of water available. As mentioned briefly in an earlier post, there is a direct relationship between the availability of water and the practices of household cleaning and personal hygiene. Tumwine et al’s analysis reveals that for each unit increase in water consumption (L/capita/day) the odds of contracting diarrhoea reduces by a factor of 0.96. This brings us back to the discussion of piped and unpiped water supplies and what they mean for domestic water availability. 

Whether household supplies are piped or unpiped also has important consequences for sanitation. The authors found that the incidence of diarrhoea was far lower in those dwellings with a latrine or other sanitation facility than in those without. This jogs my mind back to an article on flying toilets that I read last week when preparing for my blog on Kibera. If you’re interested to learn a bit more about sanitation in the continent’s largest slum then go and check it out! 

Kisumu Kenya. Source: Water Journalists Africa

Scarce, costly and uncertain: water access in Kibera

Carrying water on Kibera's railroad. Source: St. Aloysius Gonzaga High School Journalism Club

Kibera is not only Nairobi’s largest slum, but Africa’s largest slum. Now home to an estimated one million people, this settlement in the heart of Kenya’s capital began life as a home for Sudanese soldiers who had fought for the British army in WWII. Inherited upon independence in 1962, its questionable legitimacy has contributed to conditions of tremendous water scarcity and uncertainty.

Whilst residents once relied upon a nearby dam as their primary water source, today private vendors dominate. Locals face water costs that rival rents, waiting times that swallow up whole mornings and shortages that prevent basic washing and cooking practices. 

Much of the above mirrors the findings of Thompson et al. (2000) discussed in my last post. What’s new in Crow and Odaba’s (2009) article is a detailed analysis of the context. Through ethnographic research and investigative interviews the authors are able to dig deep under the surface of Kibera’s water quandary.

Beginning with Nairobi’s well documented water rationing programme, they explain how vendors in Kibera are supplied by a network of pipes, each of which is served for a different 3 days of the week. In doing so they introduce the role of corruption, and the way in which certain vendors are able to increase their supplies through illicit access to multiple pipes. 

Continuing on this theme of corruption they describe the role of cartels in the private water supply and the commonplace bribery of utility staff. Plumbers working for the Nairobi Water Company candidly discussed their willingness to selectively supply particularly groups of vendors whilst denying access to others, for the right price. 

At the consumer end the authors noted that wealth was a constraint on storage for Kibera residents. Whilst every respondent they spoke to chose to store water in their own homes, those that were unable to afford jerrycans or other suitable vessels had limited capacities. 

Crow and Odaba’s (2009) article reveals much that a regional analysis cannot. It has added corruption, cartel behaviour and storage capacity to my list of access constraints, to name but a few. In my next blog I am going to address a topic I have only so far skirted over, health and sanitation. 

Drawers of Water II

Collecting water in Nairobi. Source: AFP

Following in the footsteps of its 1967 predecessor, Drawers of Water II provides a much needed thirty year update on the state of domestic water use in East Africa. My interest in this study stems from both its significance for our understanding of urban water access and its attention to Nairobi and to Dar es Salaam — two cities that I have been fortunate enough to spend time in. 

In this blog I’m not going to attempt to give an overview of the study, or a critical analysis of its methods. Instead, I want to explore some of its main findings. Specifically I am going to discuss those disseminated by Thompson et al. (2000), a subsequent article to the main paper that took changes in urban water use as its central concern. I hope that this will give readers a good insight into some of the key issues relating to urban water access. 

Piped vs unpiped supplies — There is a consumption gap. Households with piped supplies are able to access 2.6 times more water than those with unpiped supplies (such as wells or springs). That said, the gap appears to be closing. Back in 1967 it stood at more like 8:1 piped vs unpiped. However, this has less to do with improvements in the latter and more to do with the deterioration of the former…

Declining piped supplies — Municipal piped systems appear to be collapsing in large parts of East Africa. In many cases the physical infrastructure remains functional, but the water services that once sustained urban households are no longer operating. This change has forced people to look elsewhere for their water supplies… 

Rise of private suppliers — In response to the growing demand for off grid water alternatives, kiosks and vendors have emerged across the region. This brings with it a host of new questions about how water is priced and what that means for its uses. A particularly important finding in this regard is that hygiene is one of the first things to suffer under conditions of domestic water scarcity. 

Increased waiting times — Another consequence of the increased dependency on unpiped supplies has been a hike in the time spent waiting at the tap (or well, or kiosk). Thompson et al. reported average return times from the source of 21.4 minutes in 1997 up from 9.3 minutes in 1967. These changes come with a huge opportunity cost for urban inhabitants.

These findings are critical to our understanding of urban water access in East Africa. My only gripe with DWII is that there is little room within the study for a more detailed analysis of how these issues are manifest in particular urban environments. In my next blog I will turn to Crow and Odaba’s (2009) article on Kibera, Nairobi’s largest slum, in order to contextualise what I have discussed above. 

What do we mean by access?

The UN defines access to safe water in terms of “the proportion of the population with access to an adequate amount of safe drinking water located within a convenient distance from the user’s dwelling”.

This certainly seems like a fair place to start. It incorporates quantity (an adequate amount being 20L), quality (safe drinking water indicating an improved source) and proximity (with a convenient distance set at 200m). What’s more, it allows us to quantify access, with the latest statistics for Sub-Saharan Africa standing at 56% for rural provinces and 83% for the region’s cities.

However, there is a danger here. And that danger is that these aggregate statistics can obscure the complexity of what access really means. The emphasis on proximity to a water source ensures that rural Africa will always emerge as the key concern. But, as Satterthwaite (2002) points out, urban dwellers living within 50m of a water pipe often stand as little chance of gaining access to sufficient water resources as rural dwellers who are 20km from their nearest source — “proximity does not mean access”.

In this blog I will delve further into the question of how Africa’s urban population are enabled or constrained from accessing water. I will review various articles on the topic, looking at both trends across the continent and at detailed case studies of individual urban settlements. Following the Water and Development course I intend to take an interdisciplinary approach, discussing not only matters of population density and water pricing regimes, but also the impacts of particular water sources and infrastructures. 

In my first entry, due shortly, I will be exploring the contribution made by Thompson et al’s (2001) pivotal study, Drawers of Water II, and what it means for our understanding of water access in urban East Africa.