PROVISION OF WATER TO THE POOR IN AFRICA information of an increasingly important informal water service provider.<sup>2</sup> DHS data refers only to a primary source of water, and it fails to capture the fact that households in sub-Saharan Africa, and in particular the urban poor, are increasingly forced to rely on more than one source of water. In the case of the AICD WSS database, data is divided between information coming from utility staff and government documents (74 percent) and independent studies (10 percent);<sup>3</sup> comparing these two data sources provided for a more accurate assessment of what the current multi-country data sources were missing. Comparison of case studies and the AICD analysis on the informal sector revealed that there was serious bias depending on the source. Independent studies note that information from the utility or the government overestimated the coverage of the population by standpipes and underestimated the extent of the informal water sector. Because of these caveats, comparable cross-country information (DHS) on the urban informal water sector is most likely to provide an indication of its _minimum_ coverage rather than an overall coverage level.<sup>4</sup> There is tremendous diversity among countries in the size of the unconnected market as well as in the composition of coverage provided by each water supplier. The unconnected urban population can be anywhere above 80 percent in Uganda, Mozambique, Rwanda, Nigeria, and Madagascar. In contrast, the middle-income countries in Southern Africa—Namibia and South Africa—have 21 percent and 12 percent unconnected urban population respectively. Central and Eastern Africa rely to a greater degree on standpipes (almost as important as house/yard connections); Western Africa has slightly lower reliance on standpipes (21 percent of the urban population) but substantially higher reliance on wells and boreholes (37 percent of the urban population), which can also capture a portion of the informal sector market. It is interesting that ECOWAS countries, despite being only slightly richer in per capita terms than central ones, enjoy much better piped water coverage (table 1.2). This regional (DHS) data must be interpreted with caution, because informal water sellers can show up under several categories: “standpipe” (SSIPs), “boreholes” (SSIPs), “house connection,” and “vendor.”

> 2 While DHS surveys ask respondents about water vendors, the informal water sector can take many forms, from resale of water from house connections, to resale from boreholes, to more traditional mobile water vendors who may obtain water for a variety of sources (including public standposts); some households who purchase water from their neighbor’s piped connection categorize this source as piped water from a house connection rather than a vendor, particularly in countries where such purchase is illegal or discouraged. By the same token, the DHS surveys asking about standpost use do not distinguish between public, private, network or non-network standposts. In addition, much of the cross-country data only accounts for a primary source of water, when in fact poor households may regularly rely on multiple sources for different uses. Nonetheless, to date the only available cross country primary data for urban areas comes from these imperfect sources.

> 3 Due to the common problem of lack of adequate records for the informal sector, about 16 percent of the information on the 24 largest cities in the study was not available.

4 Comparison of case study data with DHS data suggests that households reliant on resale from neighbor’s taps are likely to report in categories other than “vendor” (for example, private tap, standpost, etc.).

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