Rural Water management: is it the model, or the application of the model?

Together with colleagues from the Kwame Nkrumah University at Kumasi in Ghana ( KNUST ) Aguaconsult has completed a major quantitative study of the performance of piped rural water supply facilities in Ghana under the USAID-funded REALWater project in a consortium led by Aquaya Institute.

Locations of the sampled water supply facilities overlain on a map of Ghana's regions.

The study sought to better understand if and how management practices and conditions account for any differences in performance for three management arrangements. We measured facility performance and surveyed consumers, water facility operators, and service authorities covering 150 piped rural water facilities that represented three main management arrangements: community-based organizations, public utility and donor-supported safe water enterprises. In addition, we conducted 45 in-depth key informant interviews to support a political economy analysis, or PEA, to uncover factors that may explain variability in rural piped water system performance between these three management arrangements.

For most performance metrics, the observed differences among the three management arrangements were unexpectedly small. No management arrangement performed the best across all metrics. The most pronounced performance difference among the three management arrangements was with respect to chlorination. Safe water enterprises were more likely (and in some cases, vastly more likely) to achieve free chlorine concentrations mandated by the Ghana Standards Authority than the other two management arrangements.

We discern some mechanisms by which one management arrangement may outperform another with respect to a particular performance measure. For example, a management arrangement does predict professionalization, which we operationally defined as a combination of digitization, financial (metering and tariff recovery), financial support, training, and reporting factors. Specifically, community managed facilities in our sample are less professionalized, and are particularly much less likely to receive financial support. We also saw those contextual regional characteristics such as wealth, influence the quality of water services.

The study’s main PEA finding is that Ghana’s water sector is fragmented and reforms incomplete, with a regulatory vacuum for rural water service provision that results in: 1) safe water enterprises operating with minimal supervision and oversight, and thus setting their own tariffs and service delivery targets; 2) low support for community-managed facilities, including incomplete fulfilment of local government responsibilities as the service authority; and 3) minimal direction on how to finance rural water services. 

The lack of consistent performance differences among rural water supply management arrangements in Ghana shows that management arrangements themselves - whether run by communities, public utilities or safe water enterprises - are not the critical determinants for achieving higher levels of service delivery. It also suggests that more support to professionalize and implement clear regulations for any management arrangement would improve rural water supply performance. This would be a departure from the current emphasis on introducing different management arrangements in the search for better outcomes.

The report is available here and for more information please contact Analía Saker.