Johannesburg — More than half the population in African cities lives without access to pipe-borne water and depends on buying water from standpipe owners, water tankers or street vendors. Far from paying less than the rich pay in monthly water bills, the poor may pay many times more for their intermittent, unregulated and often unhealthy supply.
Every year, more than five million people in the developing world die from water-borne diseases.
UN-Habitat's Water for African Cities programme aims to bring the private and public sectors together to plan and fund the renewal of sometimes antiquated, leaky water systems and build the necessary infrastructure to deliver water more widely.
Last year at the WSSD in Johannesburg, a panel of African water ministers, with NGOs and UN-Habitat announced the expansion of the programme, which was already helping several African cities - Nairobi, Lusaka, Johannesburg, Dakar, Addis Ababa, Accra and Abidjan and Dar es Salaam - to reach the goal of improved services at an affordable price.
But the programme has proved controversial because it embraces a role the private sector and assumes that poor people must pay for water.
Grassroots and community activists often say that they have seen the reality of private sector involvement in public services and it is far from the rosy picture painted by the advocates of private-public partnerships in international meetings.
They complain that the private partner wants the contract's income but doesn't want to do the costly parts of the job like investing in infrastructure, spending enough to support long-term viability, and maintaining the plant. And worst of all, they believe that once consumers are locked into a relationship with a private supplier, they will be at the mercy of rising prices for services they cannot afford to do without.
UN Habitat acknowledges that there have been both successful and unsuccessful partnerships between city councils and private companies and says the key is making sure that the private partner is in it for the long term and ready to make an investment, not merely to manage a service.
And, advocates of Water for African Cities programme point out, depending on the public sector isn't a great alternative. South Africa's water minister, Ronnie Kasrils, says that at one point,60 per cent of the water supply leaked through bad taps and pipes in Soweto. The UN-Habitat secretariat says more than half of the water produced in Kenya's cities is lost before it ever reaches consumers, because of leakage and theft.
The Executive Director of UN-Habitat, Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka, is Tanzanian and has had a long career in development economics spanning academic teaching, advocacy on behalf of women in development, and supporting Tanzanian entrepreneurs to build partnerships with overseas investors. Akwe Amosu talked to her about her agency's philosophy on water.
What is the Water for African Cities Program aiming to achieve?
So the programme seeks to address the availability of water, first of all by putting into order the demand side of the equation as a basis for fruitfully addressing the supply-side. Before investment can really take place you have to have a proper management system for water supply.
In a situation of shortage, you want to make sure that the water authorities are well-managed, well organized, able to rehabilitate the pipes, the plants and the distribution networks, etc.
But also to make sure that the distribution of water is equitable, because there are many unserviced areas, particularly in some cities there are up to sixty percent of the people in unplanned settlements who do not have a single tap, for example. So this programme is looking at both the efficiency and the equity at the same time.
Investment must be made, and attitudes and values must change. It is not right for a few people connected through the municipal supply to continue enjoying subsidized water while the poor in unplanned settlements have to pay five to twenty times more.
Why is the role of the private sector so important here?
The private sector is part and parcel of our national economies and definitely these are the people who get things done. There is no reason not to tap into the resourcefulness and the energies of the private sector, provided that it's done in a responsible manner, with corporate responsibility. Water is a basic need, you cannot have profiteering, companies only interested in those who can afford water, only interested in maximizing their benefits.
But obviously the private sector has to get something out of it. Isn't there concern that once they've got their foot in the door, water companies will be in a position to hike prices and put pressure on consumers?
Well, this is where regulation comes in. It is all a question of governance, With the proper regulations, the private sector still has to operate under the regulatory framework. So, what you are looking for is partnership between the public sector with a robust, effective regulatory framework, and a private sector that also has some modern values, corporate responsibility and things like that.
So, what's the ideal division of labour between the public sector and the private sector?
I think it's a partnership. The private sector can assist governments and relieve them of the burdensome management - managing details, bidding systems, you know, the kind of vigilance you need so that things don't fall by the wayside. Sometimes, in a public engagement, you do not have enough attention paid to the details, which contribute to efficiency. So that instead of the government drowning in the details of managing water supplies, they could put up an environment within which the private sector can go into the details and supply water at an affordable price.
Could you give me an example of somewhere where you feel this is working well?
There are many examples. You know, in many African cities, you already have many private suppliers who are competing, alongside the public parastatal suppliers, and they are doing very well. In fact in my own city where I live, Nairobi, there's a clear case in a certain neighborhood, where there's a private company providing water, with a steady supply, with a competitive price, much better than the municipal suppliers have been able to offer, simply because it is better managed.
So the notion that the private sector will be more costly is not the case. Sometimes this fear, there is no basis for it. But having said this, if you improve a monopoly without appropriate regulations, then you run into the other problems of profiteering and so on that people fear might be the result.
At the Summit many people felt very strongly that this kind of programme is privatization of public assets in another guise, and that it must not be allowed to proceed. How can you reassure them; they are convinced that in practice, the poor ends up suffering?
Well, as I say, these are opinions, these are perceptions, sometimes they are well-founded sometimes they are not. And it is a question of raising awareness. For example, the notion that the poor do not pay for water, that the poor have access to free water, there is no basis for this. Our economists studied water supplies and found that the poor are paying twenty times more!
Privatization is not a panacea to the water problem. There are cases where privatization has not worked. Those have been documented. As I said earlier you have to have indicators, mechanisms of monitoring, that a privatization effort has helped or has not helped.
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What is even more important, we as a United Nations agency, we are developing the principles which must be observed in a privatization effort, if it's going to deliver results. A private company must have responsibility for investment, in the plant and machinery and pipes and repair. Otherwise you are going to have people who are just managing water and before you know it, there is a conflict between the city authorities [and the company] not to mention the population, not to mention the kind of social upheaval that such problems could bring about.
So it's not an "either/or", it is a question of the merit of each case, but observing the principles. In the context of this Water for African Cities programme, we are documenting the best cases and the worst cases and trying to learn from them.
Finally we are all aware of the very alarming figures for projected water shortages, starting in ten to fifteen years from now, but perhaps even sooner, if climate change accelerates. Are these private/public partnerships able to cope with those shortages further down the road, or will there be a need for a whole new layer of initiatives to manage them?
Well, this programme does not only look at the distribution of water, but it is also linked to the management of catchment areas and water sources. And of course, it also addresses the attitudes and even the cultural dimension - for example, just the notion of using too much water, you know, spending a good time to the bathtub, while other people don't even have access to a drop.
The pricing system must discourage wasteful use of water. You know, if you want to spend the whole day in the bathtub, you pay for it. We cannot stop people from doing it, but you have to pay the right price. So the pricing system for example, should also help to curb some of the excesses in the wasteful use of water.
