about 57 percent in 2012. The number of people with improved water access throughout the country on the other hand has also increased from 21.5 million in 2007 to 22.4 million in 2012. While progress has been made, the MDG targets were not met. Meeting the targets will be difficult especially when the country has failed to meet its 2010 target (65 percent of water coverage for its rural population).

Part of the underwhelming success of WSDP’s first phase can be attributed to the pressures of rapid population growth as discussed earlier. However, there were several other challenges. Although the WSDP was successful in changing the institutional arrangements in the sector, systemic challenges in terms of capacity, operational costs, data accountability and coordination put the program’s implementation and sustainability at risk. At the village level for example, the village committees or the COWSOs have limited technical and managerial capacity while at the central government level, the ministry has struggled to provide timely support, guidelines and budget to its implementation partners (LGAs). Additionally, the high operating costs of certain types of water pumps that were selected by the participating communities resulted in approximately half of the population paying more than 5 percent of their household income for water access<sup>7</sup> . The process of data collection and management through MOWI’s ambitious project to map all the water points in the country was not fully institutionalized. Hence it is difficult to hold the district water engineers accountable for dealing with non-functionality. Lastly, while coordination between MOWI and other participating parties such as PORALG and LGAs have steadily improved, local level planners and decision makers rarely receive feedback on implementation issues, thus adversely affecting policy reforms and resource allocations at the national level. WaterAid (2009) provided several recommendations that could potentially improve the country’s rural water access: instituting, monitoring and regulation of COWSOs, improvement of the WPM data<sup>8</sup> ; promoting more community participation; providing autonomy in managing their water infrastructure; and the provision of technical support for COWSOs to conduct complex maintenance works.

With around 21 million Tanzanians still lacking access to improved water, the country fell short of reaching its Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets to halve the proportion of people without improved drinking water and sanitation in 1990, by 2015. The new Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of reaching universal access to safe water and sanitation by 2030, will prove even more challenging. This goal includes not only providing water access to the population, but also ensuring a continuous supply of sufficient, affordable and clean water for all. While the World Bank’s support has made headway in improving access to rural water supply in the country through Rural Water Supply and Sanitation

> 7 It is reported that some were paying close to 30 percent of the household income. See DFID (2016): “Measuring and Maximizing Value for Money of Rural Water Supply (RWS) Investments in TZ”.

> 8 Better WPM data is essential to the success of Tanzania’s water targets. According to Verplanke and Georgiadou (2017) and Water Aid (2009)  the WPM database for Tanzania is riddled with errors and inaccuracies.

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