PROVISION OF WATER TO THE POOR IN AFRICA

# 4   Conclusions

Utilities in African cities have not been able to keep up with the rapid pace of urban growth, in spite of increasing the number of water connections. As a result, the urban populations with no direct water connections are expanding. This paper assesses the current level of knowledge and data on this important segment of water consumers, and identifies priorities for further research.

## Public water provision to the unconnected

Water supply through public standpipes has been the most common public solution to extend improved water services in newly developed areas in the city and to an increasing slum population. Standpipes are the most important source for the urban unconnected population, according to utility data; household survey (DHS) data confirm that all types of standpipes (not just public) accounted for 28 percent of urban coverage in surveyed countries, the most important source after house connections. However, this coverage has generally been overestimated for a variety of reasons; many public standpipes (almost one-third) are nonfunctional.

There has been a shift away from provision of free public standpipes managed by utilities to the delegation of standpipe management to private operators, to communities, or to community leaders. Only 27 percent of the utilities sampled still had standpipes free of charge. Delegation represents an effort to reduce the management burden (and cost) on the utility. The experience with different management models has been very mixed, both within cities and among cities, and has generally not resulted in the provision of a lower cost service.

While standpipes theoretically can offer a lower cost service to a larger number of consumers, there have been significant implementation challenges with these schemes. In particular, delegating standpipe management to community leaders or groups has run into problems when such schemes assume that complex urban social environments have well formed “communities”. Urban areas within cities are often heterogeneous, with varied levels of social capital and community cohesion. Failure to take this context into account has led in some cases to political involvement in the selection of standpipe managers, to the “capture” of kiosks or standpipes by local elites or individuals with little accountability to consumers, to a failure to pay utilities because of the known political cost of shutting off standpipes for non-payment and to the provision of a low quality service at a higher price. Private contractors can increase the efficiency of water provision, but they also tend to increase the cost to the consumer.

In general, many standpipe management schemes have lacked a focus on information sharing to broader groups of consumers (on prices, management structures, feedback mechanisms, or recourse for mismanagement), and transparency in the selection and management processes. Further, regulators have, by and large, not provided sufficient attention to monitoring, pricing or quality issues in this sub-sector.

Utilities are often not well equipped to deal with these political economy issues. The culture of many utilities, particularly those without incentives aligned to broader policies of expanding access, tends to center around technical aspects of service delivery, and meeting financial performance targets. Further, 37