What has caused the drinking water crisis?
For too long domestic water programmes in sub-Saharan Africa have been delivered through a public sector/aid/donor driven strategy, treating consumers as passive “beneficiaries”. The focus is dogmatically on the construction of new water points, to deliver lots of beneficiary numbers to assuage tax payers who want to see “Value for Money”. This NGO/donor industrial machine has created the wrong incentives for good delivery in the water sector in Africa and stifled the ability of individual country’s water departments from running their own simple, outcomes based, long term programmes. Instead they find themselves constantly bidding for new water sector funds, writing proposals, outputs reviews, planning, multi stakeholder meetings, attending infinite conferences and consultations; it all takes up everyones time and ability to just step back and think - hey, is this system really going to be delivered efficiently and still working in 10 years time?
Take the astonishing report by Ecorys, a consultancy, evaluating DFID’s $90 million investment into Tanzania’s water supply programme 2014-20. (The total funds committed for this Water Sector Development Programme were $1.6 billion) . By 2019, the final reported finding on functionality was that only 33% of newly installed water supply points installed were fully functional . 90% of the budget was spent constructing 43,000 new water points – of which astonishingly, 20% failed within the first year, and no one thought of pulling the plug, or changing approach on the 5 year programme (World Bank 2017[2])
“The systems installed were more complex, or costly, than local communities can sustain. Additionally, training for the community management groups has often been inadequate and there are limitations on post construction support and monitoring by the Local Government Agencies.” (World Bank 2017).
But what is staggering is that handing over millions of dollars to NGO’s to do capacity building of 181 Local Government Authorities, and expecting local District Water Engineers and local water committees, without any long term budget to maintain boreholes, pumps, overhead tanks, scaffold towers and thousands of km of pipes, was thought of as a good idea; when vast quantities of evidence from the last 30 years have proven beyond doubt that this approach is failing.
In recognition of the failure, over the last 10 years there have been efforts to attempt to reset the approach - “Payments by Results” became the new buzz word. In Tanzania, the 10 year Payment by Results WASH programme gave £300 for each functioning water point each year. But the problem was the operational approach was never changed, the model was a revamp of every failed water programme since the 1980’s. So even though the final output was supposed to be improved functionality, “the first 4 years were spent incentivising the improvement in monitoring and data systems. Before improvements in functionality could take place the foundations for institutional commitment to functionality and monitoring functionality needed to be established.” Very Alice in Wonderland. NGO’s and donors use very long reports and complex sentences to basically say a lot of expensive training was done but no one really did anything concrete, and no wonder by 2019 “few of the senior staff in the local government “were able to recall whether, from their understanding, there had been changes in the rates of functionality over time” (Ecorys 2019). This was one of the largest rural water supply country programmes in Africa and give DFID credit for sending in Ecorys who did the hard slog of actually visiting large samples of villages to really see what was happening on the ground. And as you can see from the evaluation reports listed below, lots of reports written, but what really happened to the findings? Just read by a few DFID WASH staffers who move onto to the next idea and next programme, or in the case of DFID, have a name change and lose most of their budget anyway.
The domestic water sector in sub Saharan Africa has received billions in subsidy, but how that money has been deployed has directly encouraged corruption across the board. Staff employed by international donors, and NGOs, to government employees and politicians, drilling contractors, engineers, down to those charged with collecting tiny amounts of money at water points – the culture of “allowances” to turn up to meetings, kickbacks from contractors to water officials, to hugely inflated salaries and overheads has become embedded into many parts of the sector. A majority are hard working and trying to solve a problem, but we cannot ignore the minority who use the system to their own benefit. Everyone knows this, every single UNICEF, USAID, or FCDO staffer I talk to are worried, but don’t know what to do. The truth is that prices for anything linked to water programmes are inflated because of years of flooding the market with billions of dollars of aid money. As soon as eWATER reveals we are part funded by overseas donors, everybody starts asking for ridiculous allowances, and NGO level salaries that always exceed the salaries of top surgeons. There is a reason that boreholes funded with international development assistance often cost double boreholes paid for by private home owners.
At eWATER we believe that systematic change can only be catalysed when everyone admits that the current model is a total catastrophe. Institutional egos will be bruised because right now the focus is on the vast aid machine’s own processes; entailing a constant churn of studies and reports and overpriced over designed systems that break within a year. The damage to the recipient country goes beyond the failed schemes……“the NGO Industrial Machine has created a culture of extreme corruption, stifled the integrity of the civil service, and badly distorted the ingenuity and integrity of the labour market in the water sector. Dependency on the aid engine is as big now as it was in the 1970s”. Consumers only role is as the media poster child for donors web sites, Sky TV adverts, passive, needy, dictated to. Fragmented delivery, no long-term independently verified measures, naivety and wilful ignorance by donors, billions of dollars poured into overwhelmingly disastrous programmes. So what has caused the water crisis? The answer, is probably we have.
1. World Bank (2017): High investments, low returns. Brief. Accessed at:
2. http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/923001519161501235/pdf/123624-REVISED-W17083.pdf
6. JMP 2019 data file, accessed at: https://washdata.org/data/downloads#TZA
7. Lockwood (2019); ‘Sustaining Rural Water: A Comparative Study of Maintenance Models For Community-Managed Schemes’ USAID/Sustainable WASH Systems Learning Partnership, Research Report, July 2019. Available at: https://www.globalwaters.org/resources/assets/sws/ComparativeStudy-MaintenanceModels- CommunityManagedSchemes
8. DFID (2013): Business Case: Support to Rural Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene in Tanzania
9. DFID (2014) Annual Review: Support to Rural Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene in Tanzania
10. DFID (2015) Annual Review: Support to Rural Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene in Tanzania
11. DFID (2016) Annual Review: Support to Rural Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene in Tanzania
12. DFID (2016): DFIDT PbR water sector communication 30 July 2016 (untitled PPT presentation)
13. DFID (2017) Annual Review: Support to Rural Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene in Tanzania
14. DFID (2018) (unpublished): Payment by Results: Performance Report for MoW and PORALG for 2018
15. DFID (2018) Annual Review: Support to Rural Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene in Tanzania
16. DFID (2019) Annual Review: Support to Rural Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene in Tanzania
17. DIME (2017b): The Power and Processes of the Payment by Results Program. A process evaluation of the Payment by Results (PbR) program in Tanzania’s rural water supply sector
18. DIME (2017e): Village Logbooks and Water Access in Tanzania. Understanding the drivers of rural water maintenance in Tanzania. Note 3.
19. DIME (2017d): What do Local Governments Need to Deliver More Sustainable Water Services? Understanding the drivers of rural water maintenance in Tanzania. Note 2.
[1] (Using Payment by Results to Improve the Sustainability of Rural Water Supply Services in Tanzania. Lessons Learned 2014-2019)
[2] World Bank (2017): High investments, low returns. Brief. Accessed at http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/923001519161501235/pdf/123624-REVISED-W17083.pdf
