Article written by Lorna Grace Okotto.
Improving access to safe and affordable water in ‘off-grid’ poor urban neighbourhoods- has been a key concern for a long time because water is essential for sustenance of life. According to the United Nations, over two billion people worldwide are without access to drinking-water services in their homes that is available when needed and free from contamination, mostly in rural areas and least developed countries. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the number of people lacking safe water has increased by more than 40 per cent since 2000 with many of these living LIAs as well. Furthermore, over three billion are believed to be at significant risk because the quality of the water sources they use is unknown due to unavailability of water quality data.
One approach to tackling this issue for the urban poor is the Delegated Management Model (DMM). Under DMM, a water utility forms a partnership with a local under-privileged community, and then passes on responsibility for management of pipeline infrastructure and water service delivery to a small-scale enterprise or community group. DMM draws on community resources and helps improve the performance of the utility in the challenging contexts of poor urban neighbourhoods, where residents struggle to pay water connection fees and tariffs. Through the DMM scheme, a water utility can therefore overcome some of the barriers that prevent the urban poor from accessing higher water service levels such as household pipeline connections.
Although DMM has achieved a lot, its impact on safety of water has not been clear. Our Water and Waste Team set out to assess the ability of DDM to deliver safe water in Kisumu, Kenya, comparing water contamination in DMM areas to similar control areas without DMM. We found that water quality had greatly improved when we compared our results to those of previous studies of faecal contamination of source water and water stored in the home in Kisumu that took place from 2005 to 2013.
We also found out that DMM had eliminated mobile handcart water vendors fetching water from kiosks and selling it door-to-door. , This removes a potential source of water contamination since the hand-cart vendors’ presence in the water supply chain introduces yet more water handling and a potential to contamination pathway for water obtained from an otherwise safe source. Although the water sold at kiosks was contamination-free, we found in both DMM and non-DMM areas that it became contaminated once people carried it home and stored it. Kisumu’s DMM programme now serves nearly 8,000 water network connections to both homes and kiosks, nearly a fifth of those in the city. In the long-term, whether it is via DMM or through water utilities, our fieldwork suggests we can cut water contamination by providing people with uninterrupted connections to piped water in their homes so that they no longer need to store water collected from elsewhere.
