Providing access to safe drinking water remains a huge challenge in many parts of rural Africa. Improved financing strategies are necessary to serve the poorest and most vulnerable people, while ensuring that there are sufficient funds to sustain services.

One of the 7th Millennium Development Goal targets is to halve the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water by 2015. However, even existing services are struggling. Research from the University of Loughborough in the UK investigates various financial aspects of water provision and presents a systematic approach to determining service delivery costs.

In the past, external experts constructed new water supplies and handed them over to user communities to manage without adequate financing strategies. This approach was too simplistic. While focusing on short-term capital costs, planners did not adequately address long-term costs associated with operating such systems. As a result, an estimated 35 percent of existing water systems in rural sub-Saharan Africa are not working at any given time.

Ideally, sustainable financing strategies cover direct operational costs as well as institutional support, rehabilitation and expansion costs. While full cost-recovery for rural water services in Africa is rarely achievable, it seems more realistic to cover ongoing services and recurrent maintenance costs. So far, determining the real costs of service provision has been a problem because tariffs have not been set systematically.

The research suggests a comprehensive assessment of maintenance, repair and rehabilitation costs for different water system technologies. On that basis, it is possible to develop a more realistic system of tariffs. Regarding sustainable finances in rural water provision, the researcher identifies several issues:

• Direct maintenance and operation costs are generally affordable for rural communities. However, household water tariffs increases by almost four times when rehabilitation and expansion costs are added.
• Community-based management systems lack adequate institutional support.
• Users are unwilling to pay for costs because water is perceived as a right, which might be due to political interference. At the same time, users do not trust water management authorities.
• Infrastructure development is far too capital-intensive and will continue to depend on external support for the foreseeable future.

Despite huge challenges, there is the potential to improve water services in rural areas, particularly in financing strategies. Among the recommendations, the research highlights the following:

• Rural water systems must incorporate recurrent repair costs and future asset replacement to reflect the real costs of service delivery.
• Community management organisations must implement more transparent, secure and sustainable methods of storing and investing money.
• Local governments need to develop budgets to finance institutional support for community-based management systems.
• Unsustainable subsidies need to be phased out and mechanisms for sustainable cross-subsidy developed.

Source(s):
‘Cost determination and sustainable financing for rural water services’, Water Policy 9, pages 373-391, by Peter Harvey, 2007
‘Management of Rural Water Services in Sub-Saharan Africa’, Proceedings of the Institute of Civil Engineers: Civil Engineering, 159.4,  pages 178-184, by Peter Harvey, J Uno, and Robert Reed, November 2006
‘Community-Managed Water Supplies in Africa: Sustainable or Dispensable?’, Community Development Journal, 42.3, pages 365-378, by Peter Harvey and Robert Reed, 2007

id21 Research Highlight: 11 December 2007

Further Information:
Water, Engineering and Development Centre
Institute for Development Engineering
Loughborough University
Loughborough, LE11 3TU
UK

Tel: +44 (0)1509 228743
Contact the contributor: P.A.Harvey@lboro.ac.uk

Water, Engineering and Development Centre, Loughborough University, UK

Other related links:
'Achieving sustainable water supply in rural Africa'

'Assisting self-help water supplies in Uganda'

'Recovering the costs of rural water supply: Community initiatives in Nigeria'

'Lack of spare parts for handpumps reduces access to water in Africa'

'Tapping the rural water market in Cambodia'

'New approaches to manage rural water supplies in India'