Prospects for achieving and maintaining universal drinking water services

October 15th, 2013

Dr. Rob Hope, Oxford University, United Kingdom

Despite meeting the water access Millennium Development Goal over 780 million people lack improved water services. Prospects for progress in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa are most concerning. Short-term, political fixes or well-meaning donor interventions often fail and cumulatively waste huge amounts of public money. However, there is evidence of strong performance in some of the most difficult and challenging rural and urban contexts that provide a case for optimism. Drawing upon examples of best practice, we present evidence to inform more effective policy and investments in a recent study entitled ‘Risks and Responsibilities to Universal Drinking Water Security’.1

We examine how effective water service providers respond to financial, operational and institutional risks. First, paying to maintain and accelerate drinking water services is central to success. In Africa, urban water utilities fail to collect over USD1 billion each year and pipes leak over a third of the water which is stored, treated and piped under pressure. Rural water users generally don’t pay for water services, which is significantly associated with low functionality of handpumps.2 Smarter payment systems that provide secure and convenient alternatives are now being tested with positive results across rural and urban Africa.

Second, maintaining and monitoring water service operations is an unromantic but critical pathway to building a social contract for user payments and reducing water losses.3 No politically-attractive photo opportunities are associated with the daily grind of delivering services. Global water access targets traditionally focus on ‘technology access’ rather than ‘service delivery’. Hitting ambitious political ‘access’ targets leads to a least-cost economic logic that under-invests in operational performance. People want water to flow not a shiny handpump or tap that sits idly under the sun. Monitoring inevitably costs money and leads to more transparency but uncertain political support as investment decisions become more accountable. Chasing targets is not always compatible with sustaining results.

Third, institutions matter; they are the glue that informs and enforces incentives to achieve and maintain universal service delivery. Political interference and corrupt practices in the water sector are well-known but can be tackled. While it might be assumed there would be a wide political constituency for a model that delivers affordable water to more people with lower resource impacts, this is not necessarily the case. Institutional reform is neither quick nor easy and ephemeral stories often trump prosaic progress. Uganda and Singapore substantiate how transformative change requires decadal time-frames. New institutional models have emerged in the rural water sector in India, Kenya and Senegal which effectively but not uniquely use mobile technologies to address operational and financial risks.

Cities such as Phnom Penh and Kampala have shifted in a decade from regional laggards to best in class. Piped rural water services in West Africa have improved with more accountable financial and operational systems supported by a mobile-enabled monitoring system. Evidence from Nairobi and Dar es Salaam demonstrate how mobile payments can contribute to more secure and reliable financial flows, though regional uptake suggests caution on simplistic thoughts on scaling-up (see Mobile water payments in urban Africa: Adoption, implications and opportunities).

Urban population growth presents unprecedented challenges, nowhere more so than the cities of urban South Asia which will be home to 3.3 billion people by 2050. India’s ’24/7′ model was initially (and honestly) thought by some politicians to be 7 hours of water every 24 days based on familiarity with the erratic nature of existing water services. Historical scepticism and political opposition led to Delhi’s rejection of 24/7 sending it south to Karnataka. A few years later a three city trial has achieved universal piped water coverage, including the income poor, with reliable and affordable services. Civil society groups now welcome 24/7 implementation plans in Delhi reflecting a new bench-mark for water service delivery across India.

Remote and fragmented rural settlements often make piped connections an unrealistic option. This is reflected by an increase in piped water coverage from 4% to 5% since 1990 in rural Africa. Point sources dominate particularly handpumps which provide low-cost access to groundwater of generally good quality to some 200 million rural Africans. Handpump functionality is a major problem with rural water users unable to manage operational, financial and institutional risks.

Grundfos’ LIFELINK system presents a new model. Groundwater is pumped using solar panels to a raised storage tank supplying a closed water vending system accessed by a pre-paid, user ‘fob’ card. The system addresses all three drinking water risks. First, the system is installed in communities where there is demand to mitigate institutional risk. Second, Grundfos guarantees the system for a decade which lowers operational risk. Third, the pre-paid fob cards use a mobile money platform. This provides a closed-loop payment mechanism that reduces financial risk. Volumetric water consumption is posted on an open-access website, demonstrating a level of transparency unequalled in the rural water sector.

Where LIFELINK faces sustainability challenges is in scale and cost. The business model functions well where there is demand of 1000 people or more consuming 25 litres per day. While the system is relatively expensive it guarantees service delivery for 10 years throwing down a gauntlet to the least-cost logic of handpumps which are often abandoned after a year or two. Establishing a ‘sustainability clause’ powered by real-time monitoring systems has implications for water users, donors, politicians and NGOs. It challenges short-term, least-cost and target-driven interventions by closing the information loop between investments and sustained outcomes. Shining light where shade has disguised uneven performance is not welcome by all.

Despite the often gloomy outlook voiced by some on the prospects for universal drinking water security, these case studies show there are realistic pathways to achieve and maintain this moral, social and economic imperative, thereby potentially improving the health and wealth of millions of people.

References:

1. Hope, R. and M. Rouse (2013), ‘Risks and responses to universal drinking water security’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 371(2002).

2. Foster, T. (2013), ‘Predictors of sustainability for community-managed handpumps in sub-Saharan Africa: Evidence from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Uganda’, Environmental Science and Technology (Accepted Manuscript – In Press), available online at: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es402086n.

3. Rouse, M. (2013), Institutional Governance and Regulation of Water Services: Second Edition, International Water Association Publishing: London, UK.

Rob Hope is Director of the Water Programme at the Smith School for Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford University, http://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/people/robhope.html. He leads the mobile/water for development research group: http://oxwater.co.uk. The full set of 15 papers on ‘Water Security, Risk and Society’ published by the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A can be found at: http://bit.ly/PTA2002.

The views expressed in this article belong to the individual authors and do not represent the views of the Global Water Forum, the UNESCO Chair in Water Economics and Transboundary Water Governance, UNESCO, the Australian National University, or any of the institutions to which the authors are associated. Please see the Global Water Forum terms and conditions here.