Comments (6)

1. 

   Webmaster - August 23rd, 2011 at 9 h 48 min

   UN Habitat provides here concrete solutions to community-managed water supply issue. Has the solution been implemented by third part civil partners /NGOs  ?.

2. 

   Anthony Akpan - December 30th, 2011 at 11 h 40 min

    

   I think it is very impoertant we begin to look at private Water Vendors and begin to articulate how to integrate them into the city supply system. Here are my proposal;

   Proposal for Enhancing the Role of Water Vendors in the Sustainable and Safe Water Provisioning Services in  Nigeria: A Case Study of Lagos State.

    
   In the context of the burgeoning growth of the city of Lagos, neither state monopolies, their privatised successors, the concessionaires, nor non-profit or community-based organisations has been able to keep up with the pace of rising demand for water and sanitation services in the low-income urban areas. Fewer than 30 percent of households in Lagos have access to piped drinking water. Piped sewerage is but a far-distant dream for 90 percent of urban Lagosians. Yet governments have generally continued to give priority to the tried and true, standard issue solution: a citywide piped network run by a single, monopolistic operator. But this monolithic solution does not match the wide variation in demand for these services by a wide variety of households, living in very different environments and using different amounts of water that vary by the time of day and from season to season. The situation is not unique to Lagos.
    
   A number of studies have documented, for example, the fact that citizens choose to opt out of failing public systems and that the majority of poor households across developing countries are served by informal service providers (see, as an example, the ten-country study of informal water vendors by Collignon and Vezina 2000). Moreover, households in these circumstances are often unwilling to pay full prices for government services and will pay higher amounts to private vendors (Nickson and Franceys 2003). Still, Most policymakers in the water sector are preoccupied with pricing and cost recovery without fully understanding household behaviour. Although the implementation of cost recovery measures may be economically efficient, the quality of municipal services must be as good as or greater than what they could obtain from private vendors (Fox & Edmiston 2000).
    
   Even the most experienced international water corporations have had to admit how hard it is to find a way to get water to poor urban households, most of whom live in unplanned or poorly planned subdivisions, often located at the city’s edge, on difficult terrain (steep hillsides and valleys) and in undeveloped infill areas (Budds and McGranahan 2003). These marginal locations are very difficult to serve through the usual water distribution and drainage networks.
    
   Water vendors respond to the needs and preferences of a clientele composed
   primarily of low-income families. How do they manage to do this, for customers who are said to be too poor to pay for city water? How can they provide service coverage of areas where city water authorities and concessionaires hesitate to invest? One answer, documented in a 1990 study of willingness to pay in rural Nigeria,  is that water vendor services’ are demand-driven and they deliver them the way their clientele needs them: reliably, and in small quantities, which remain affordable when family funds are tight, and incomes irregular. The clients these providers serve have historically been of little interest to the large concessionaires, whose primary objective is to make a profit.
    
   Water vendors serve many functions in the provision of water services. Some manage one or more water points or sell individual buckets of water from door to door.Such activities provide jobs for several thousands people in Lagos providing a source of income to thousands of low-income families. More flexible than the concessionaires, water vendors can respond more easily to rapid changes in demand linked to the growth of unplanned urban areas. They offer a wide variety of services close to where people live, allowing them to select the most convenient. They adapt to the limitations of their clients’ needs and income, and communicate face-to-face with their clients about problems, for example, with water quality, rather than at a distance and through the time consuming bureaucratic procedures of the concessionaires. For this reason, a strategy of making immediate improvements in household access to safe water necessitates starting with the service providers who are already on the ground doing the job the state is unable to do.
    
   However, there are also huge problems associated with water vendors that need to be factored into appropriate interventions, namely the high price of vended water and lack of mechanism for cross-subsidies to the poorest households, the lack of registration and monitoring, the use of non-standard equipment and supplies making the regulation of water quality difficult, institutional barriers to accessing credit by informal entrepreneurs, among other challenges. A 2007 study of household access to water in Lagos managed by Pan African Vision for the Environment revealed that many households in Lagos would be willing to pay a premium for improved water quality, given that most are forced to rely on separate supplies of water for drinking, cooking, bathing and washing (Acey 2009).
    
   All of these issues require careful study of the institutional context, urban governance of the water sector, particularly its regulation and finance, and the operating characteristics of the vendors to propose a set of recommendations to bring this informal sector under a scheme that would allow vendors to expand their operations and dramatically improve the quality of water supplied.
    

    

3. 

   irongate - December 30th, 2011 at 14 h 34 min

   Mr Akpan

   I hope you will consider my thesis.  It addresses cost.  The private vendor, in my opinion as well, need not be eliminated.  They do serve a valuable service as you outlined and should be incorporated into my proposal.  Whether operated by the government or privately the system functions the same; getting water to the people.  I estimate it would take a 1/2 year to get a monetary policy running.  An initial quarter year to provide distribution costs and a quarter to receive those costs in genuine coin.

   The clients currently are paying for this water any time consumed initiating a monetary exchange is irrelevant to the client and the end result with the entreprenuer is a simple reality:  have I gotten my dividends for water distribution.  This monetary policy would create a lower cost of living, create more jobs, and re-investment into the infrastructure.  A Water Monetary Standard would encompass both water service and sewer services as well as recycled trash programs under the same principal as outlined in the paper: the absolute value.

4. 

   Bilal Khan - January 3rd, 2012 at 11 h 47 min

   @Anthony: this is a great case study. I think you can develop a solution out of this case study and submit it on http://www.solutionsforwater.org/submit-a-solution

   @Michael: Can you give us some examples of a “Water Monetary Standard”?

   Great conversation Anthony and Michael. Keep it going!

5. 

   Anthony Akpan - January 4th, 2012 at 6 h 33 min

   I have already submitted it at the solutions platform

6. 

   Bilal Khan - January 19th, 2012 at 15 h 39 min

   Thank you Anthony!