Community water management: practical and achievable?

Community water management has been a widely accepted strategy in primarily low-income countries suffering from water insecurity problems. It seems to be a straightforward solution: every community is responsible for its own water resources. Is that really the case?

In Sub-Saharan Africa(SSA) Countries, community development and sustainability have become very important due to the inefficiency of top-down approaches and government supports. Involving the locals in all stages of a project is therefore considered essential for well-functioning community management in the long run. Involving the locals in the selection of appropriate technologies, sites and service levels, and encouraging them to pay for part of the investment, operation and maintenance costs, is essential to gaining community support. In some cases, the locals may find this cheap water supply beneficial and would like to participate. In other cases, local users may expect the services to be free since they may think it is the government's responsibility. Are these community water management schemes workable or practical?

Despite continuous water delivery and sanitation improvements over the last two decades, SSA continues to trail behind all other global south areas. Lots of SSA countries have decentralised political authority from the centre to local administrations during the 1990s, such as Mali in 1993 and Rwanda in 2002. Water and sanitation reform has been accomplished, with decentralisation in the process. Local private operators are widespread in Rwanda's rural regions. The majority of the region's governments have taken an active part in infrastructure development. Other nations are experimenting with various options, such as self-watering and sanitation, in which the users bear the investment expenses of the most essential systems. Self-sufficiency is currently part of Ethiopian national policy and has previously been practised on a significant basis in Zimbabwe.

Figure 1: Children play by a newly installed hand pump in the village of Jedane. (Link)

The implementation of a community water management scheme is not as practical and achievable as people may think. Despite the increased emphasis on community management, service failures have not diminished considerably over the previous thirty years, as many studies have often pointed out. Reduced or depleted water supplies, late maintenance, rehabilitation failures, insufficient availability of replacement parts, and insufficient cost recovery are all reasons for rural water service interruption in Ethiopia. Also, the human resources are not enough to maintain these local projects, leading back to the lack of government support. Hence, governments provide support and information to local communities for them before the implementation of projects.

Overall, community water management is not always achievable and practical as a solution in Sub-saharan Africa. Alternative solutions can be increasing private sector participation. Studies by the World Bank have shown that more attention needs to be paid to private sector operations for all types of rural water supply. Government intervention should be generally improved significantly in urban areas. The following blog will discuss private sector participation in African water supplies.