Making clean drinking water universally available “achievable”

Late bills are still a huge problem in developing countries, so consequently there is often a failure to recoup the service costs needed to invest in the infrastructure. The study highlights a successful mobile water payment system adopted in one Kenyan city, which was the preferred way of paying bills for 85 percent of customers who would otherwise often have to queue in water company offices. More efficient and transparent payment systems were not only found to reduce debts, but also helped root out corrupt practices which diverted water payments into illegitimate channels.

The study warns that barriers to progress include the vested interests of individuals benefiting from the status quo, and misguided public investments which are short-term and without any real measures of performance. The authors argue, however, that these findings provide concrete evidence to demonstrate how drinking water risks can be managed and reduced “even in the most difficult and challenging contexts.”

Lead author Dr. Rob Hope, from the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford, said: “We hope this study provides a framework to design policy and guide investments to systematically reduce drinking water risks in urban and rural contexts.

”These case studies demonstrate a variety of approaches taken by countries in some of the most challenging circumstances.

“They set benchmarks by which others can measure their own progress. Our examples include water managers who have introduced both bonus systems to reward good performance and competitions between different areas to drive up standards of service. Some water service providers have found ways of giving subsidies to expand access to water customers on the lowest incomes. There are other examples of initiatives to promote greater efficiency which can mean leaks or water pumps get fixed more quickly or water rationing can be replaced with a continuous service.

“Despite the often gloomy outlook voiced by some on the prospects for making drinking water more accessible, these case studies in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia show there are realistic pathways to transform  water services, thereby potentially improving the health of the millions of people who depend upon them.”

The release notes that in the same collection of papers, Professor David Bradley of Oxford University, with Professor Jamie Bartram, uses an analysis of the effective monitoring program developed to measure the success of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for the provision of domestic water supply and basic sanitation to see how it can be further improved and possibly be applied to a broader goal of water security.

— Read more in Jim Hall et al., eds., Water security, risk and society, special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A (13 November 2013)