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Introduction
Key Issues
• Data
• Expanding Water Supply to Unserviced Neighborhood
• Access to Safe Water Sources
• Water System Efficiency and Cost Recovery
• Institutional Efficiency and Benchmarks
• Land Insecurity
• Tariff Structures
• Customer Orientation & Public Participation
• Decentralization and Devolution
• Appropriate Technology
Urban Water Supply Bibliography & Key Contacts
• General Urban Environmental Sources
• Specific Water Supply Sources
Key Contacts and Useful Websites
Introduction
Affordable, abundant and clean water is essential for human well-being. There are clear linkages between access to potable water and health, nutrition levels and subsequently education achievement, labor productivity and economic growth. However, for the urban poor reliable access to clean and affordable water often is unavailable. As many as 500 million urban residents have inappropriate access to water services or experience water scarcity. [USAID/PADCO, 2001]. The World Bank reports that "some 25% of the urban population of Latin America and at least 50% of the urban population of Africa are not connected to official utility networks and rely on alternative sources for their water supply." (World Bank Water Sanitation Website) For middle-class residents regular water supply is one of the most valued urban services. Often, even these families face de facto rationing. In many cities demand for water, at current tariff levels, greatly outstrips supply, resulting in water management strategies that deliver water to households only for a few hours each day or for certain days of the week. Given the pressures of urban population growth, especially of low-income families that construct dwellings at the urban fringe far removed from main trunk lines, providing adequate supplies of safe water will remain one of the biggest urban challenges in coming decades.
Key Issues
Data
There are some real challenges to be faced in collecting sound data on access to water in cities. While the data we have clearly outlines a need for expanded service delivery, it tends to mask several challenges. First, the data tends to measure "access" by number of stand-pipes and/or taps per square kilometer or some other defined area. This measure is then used in a uniform fashion to compare access in urban and rural environments. Unfortunately, we do not have good data on volume of use (number of people drawing water from a particular source), frequency of service delivery (how often does water run from a particular tap), and water quality. These are key issues in urban areas where hundreds and even thousands of people may be packed into a square kilometer, dependent on two or three public taps that only run once a day or even every other day. Service quality and coverage can have a profound effect on the health and well-being of the urban poor who may be spending long hours waiting in line (at all hours of the day and night) to get water of questionable quality that they may be forced to store in less than sanitary conditions. Donors and governments must find new ways to measure "access" if we are to truly understand the plight of the urban poor.
Expanding Water Supply to Unserviced Neighborhood
According to United Nations and WHO standards, minimally acceptable water access consists of having a source of abundant, safe drinking water within 200 meters. This standard implies that standpipes and outside water connections can be part of the solution, especially in high-density low-income areas where the realistic alternative is expensive and unsafe water delivered by truck or no water supply at all. A majority of developing countries, however, have been unwilling to incorporate such reduced standards in their urban planning. The result has been a publicly endorsed "right" to inside-the-house public water supply, which many residents in fact do not receive, leading to frustration, resentment and illegal connections. Public authorities face the policy challenge of defining a standard of water service that meets critical health objectives, is financially sustainable within the resources available to families and the public water supplier, and yet is acceptable to the community. Public participation in water supply decisions is part of the solution. Once households recognize how their costs of water supply will differ with varying types of service, community members often can agree on the preferred type of service for their neighborhood. Such an approach requires that the costs of supplying and distributing water are accurately reflected in user tariffs, and that communities can choose among different combinations of tariff and service level.
Access to Safe Water Sources
In many parts of the world, cities dump untreated human wastes, along with industrial and agricultural wastes, into the same rivers or lakes, from which other cities (or other neighborhoods of the same city) extract their water supply. Preserving sources of safe water supply, in the face of rapid urban growth, requires advance planning -often on a regional basis - plus enforcement of watershed protection measures and application of urban growth restrictions. Industries with toxic effluents, or high-density residential developments with untreated wastes, need to be steered away from water sources or areas that will need to be drawn upon as water sources in the future. Economic incentives or regulations can be set up to accomplish this. (See the UEM brief )
Water System Efficiency and Cost Recovery
Dealing with aging distribution systems imposes high economic costs for resource-strapped urban water and sanitation service (WSS) providers. It is not rare for 40% or more of all water that enters the distribution system to be unaccounted for through theft, illegal hook-ups, abuses of the right to free water, and, most importantly, leakage, either through public mains or household connections. Some urban water systems in Eastern Europe have found as much as 90% of consumer meters are non-functioning, making it impossible to establish efficient pricing systems. Pumping stations and treatment works may fail because individual pieces of machinery are no longer manufactured or because specialized chemicals cannot be imported due to lack of foreign exchange. A quick diagnosis of the present water supply and distribution system often can turn up small investment opportunities that have high economic paybacks, merely by nudging the system toward practical operability and cost recovery. Savings can be plowed back into investment in system expansion or modernization.
Institutional Efficiency and Benchmarks
Greater involvement of the private sector in water supply and distribution, through innovative approaches like public-private partnerships, may improve the institutional efficiency of WSS providers. WSS providers with a profit incentive are more likely to stress efficiency in water delivery. At the same time, the public partners in these partnerships may stress greater accountability to consumers and to municipal government. The result can be better focused cost-recovery strategies, along with billing and collection procedures that are both more accurate and better accepted by the community. Improved efficiency and better rates of cost recovery can generate benefits at all levels. The urban poor receive customer-oriented service. WSS providers can stand on their own feet financially, without becoming a drain on the general municipal budget. The city's political leadership can reap the political capital of better water access. Of course, private-sector participation in urban water supply can be abused. To be fully successful it requires a regulatory framework that rewards the WSS provider for meeting important public benchmarks, such as defined coverage ratios for the urban population, reductions in leakage and unaccounted-for water, and continued attainment of water quality standards. This in turn requires active monitoring of outputs by municipalities or their agents, often community NGOs.
Land Insecurity
The urban poor often live in informal settlements treated as illegal by municipal governments and WSS providers. (See the Slum Upgrading brief) The lack of legal recognition of these settlements and the corresponding lack of tenure rights of inhabitants can be a major hurdle to securing access to improved water sources. Solutions may require innovative alternatives on the part of municipal governments, WSS agencies, as well as residents of the informal settlements. Public authorities can grant de facto recognition to informal communities, extending basic water services to them, well before the time-consuming procedures of legal formalization have been completed. Improved access to alternative water sources, such as community taps or water kiosks operated by community microentrepreneurs, can be provided without waiting for resolution of land ownership claims. Sites and services projects can economize on the costs of water supply, by locating land for self-help development near existing water distribution systems, as long as the sites serve other community objectives, such as reasonable access to work.
Tariff Structure
Cost recovery in the urban water sector varies widely across developing countries. Some countries manage to recover all Operating & Maintenance costs, plus a significant portion of capital costs. Others average less than 30-40% recovery of O&M costs alone. Well-designed tariff schedules serve multiple purposes. They can allow the water supplier to be self-financing, thereby encouraging the extension of water service to new users. They can help curb demand. Some of the apparent shortfall of urban water supply is a function of providing water for free or at highly subsidized tariffs, which results in excessive water "demand" that is reduced with realistic pricing. Tariffs also can be used to encourage system efficiency. Leaks, for example, can be brought under control by making the party responsible for repairs bear the costs of lost water. Unfortunately, in designing tariff structures for water consumption, the goals of economic efficiency, cost recovery and financial self-sufficiency for the supplying institution, and equity for consumers of different income levels often come into conflict. There is no universally preferred tariff structure. There are, however, clearly bad tariff systems. Charging all households a uniform monthly amount for water usage, without metering consumption or differentiating by the level of service, though still often found in urban areas, violates most of the objectives of a pricing system. Other elements of tariff design will vary with the most important policy objectives. Where low coverage rates are the primary problem, importance needs to be assigned to full cost recovery, in order that capital market funds, either in the form of private sector investment or private sector lending to WSS institutions, can be attracted. (See, for example OECD/DAC "Shaping the Urban Environment in the 21st Century, and SANICON's "Finance and Economics," "Policies and Strategies," and "Institutional Development"; and the Capital Finance Brief )
Customer Orientation & Public Participation
The participation of all stakeholders in water supply, distribution, and tariff decisions is critical, but often overlooked in the water sector. Planning to protect water resources will require public cooperation and development of alternative sites for economic activity. Providing some communities with lower levels of water service, like community standpipes, can succeed only if residents are part of the service decision in the first place and are able to enjoy substantial cost savings by accepting the lower service standards. Financial shortfalls of WSS institutions often are due to poor collection rates and illegal connections-community issues that can only be resolved by engaging the community in decisions about how illegal usage should be monitored and how past-due water bills should be collected. Municipalities can play an important role in establishing incentives for WSS providers, particularly those in the private sector to be more customer-service oriented, responsive and accountable to customers. Private sector involvement in water supply may facilitate this customer orientation. (See USAID's Urban Water Supply and Sanitation Guide)
Decentralization and Devolution
In recent years, many developing countries have transferred responsibility for water supply and distribution to municipal governments. Some necessary conditions for such transfers to work have become apparent. Local governments must have tariff-setting authority, not be constrained by national price controls. Local government or local water authorities must have access to capital markets in order to finance system expansion. This generally will require some type of intergovernmental support for local borrowing at the outset. Local authorities will need the planning support of higher-level governments, so as to protect regional water sources. They may need assistance in capacity building to levy and collect water tariffs, and assistance in selecting appropriate technologies. Central and regional governments cannot expect to walk away from the urban water sector simply because responsibility for service delivery has been assigned to lower levels of government. Often, devolution of service responsibilities in the water sector has been accompanied by greater use of private enterprises either as system managers, with water assets continuing to be held by public authorities, or in other variants. Decentralization provides an opportunity not merely to re-allocate service responsibilities but to re-think how public and private institutions working in consort can best meet the challenge of efficiently providing water to today's residents while establishing the capacity for water investments to keep pace with urban growth in the future.
Appropriate Technology
Low-cost technologies are now available for water supply, supported in many cases by institutional experience that has made their implementation acceptable to users and entire communities. Such innovations include community/group water taps, private-sector community water kiosks, methods for combining public water supply in towns with rainwater collection by homeowners, as well as complementary sanitary technologies that save on water usage. Often, the primary obstacle to implementation is cultural resistance to new habits. Experience with successful introductions of technological innovations in similar cultures may be at least as useful as information on the technologies themselves. (See the World Bank Water & Sanitation site, USAID's Development Clearinghouse and the Water Engineering and Development Centre)
Urban Water Supply Bibliography & Key Contacts
General Urban Environmental Sources
- OECD/DAC "DAC Reference Manual on Urban Environmental Policy"
- http://www1.oecd.org/dac/urbenv/Shaping.html
- OECD/DAC "Shaping the Urban Environment in the 21st Century"
- http://www1.oecd.org/dac/urbenv/dac-s21c_fulldoc.pdf
- UNEP "State of the Environment and Policy Retrospective: 1972-2002" in Global Environmental Outlook 3 (section on urban areas pp 240-269)
- http://www.unep.org/GEO/geo3/index.htm
- World Bank "Urban Environmental Priorities" Environment Strategy Background Papers January 2001
- http://www.worldbank.org
Specific Water Supply Sources
- DEC (Development Experience Clearinghouse - an online database of over 15,000 USAID documents and reports) Search for 'urban' and 'water'
- http://www.dec.org
- GARNET http://info.lut.ac.uk/departments/cv/wedc/garnet/grntacti.html
- (Global Applied Research Network: GARNET is a mechanism for information exchange in the water supply and sanitation sector using low-cost, informal networks of researchers, practitioners and funders of research) select: links, resources or archive
- UNESCO Water Portal http://www.unesco.org/water/
- UNICEF/WES (UNICEF's Water Environment and Sanitation Dept. and their website)
- http://www.unicef.org/programme/wes/
- USAID/PADCO 'Urban Water Supply and Sanitation Programming Guide'
- http://www.makingcitieswork.org/urbanws/Guide/guide_print.pdf (in addition to the manual, the document also contains a comprehensive bibliography see section IV)
- Water, Engineering and Development Centre (WEDC) at Loughborough University
- http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/cv/wedc/index.htm (in particular, see their links to publications and research)]
- WaterAid (a large, UK-based water NGO)
- http://www.wateraid.org.uk/
- Watermark: The site dedicated to the development of water supply surveillance
- and monitoring in low-income and transitional countrieshttp://www.lboro.ac.uk/watermark/index.htm
- Wegelin-Schuringa, Madeleen; "Strategic elements in water supply and sanitation
- services in urban low-income areas" International Water and Sanitation Centre
- http://www.irc.nl/index.php
- Wegelin-Schuringa, Madeleen; "Water Demand Management and the Urban Poor"
- International Water and Sanitation Centre
- http://www.irc.nl/index.php
- WHO/UNICEF "Water supply and sanitation in large cities" Chap 4 in Global Water Supply
- and Sanitation Assessment 2000 Report, World Health Organization and United Nations Children's Fund, 2000. http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/Globassessment/Glassessment4.pdf
Key Contacts and Useful Websites
- InterWater: Internet Gateway to Water and Sanitation Information
- http://www.wsscc.org/interwater/
- IRCDOC (an internet-based bibliographic database on water supply and
- sanitation in developing countries)
- http://www.irc.nl/products/documentation/ircdoc/search.html
- PADCO http://www.padcoinc.com/
- USAID Office of Urban Programs
- http://www.makingcitieswork.org
- USAID Water Team
- http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/environment/water/index.html
- Water Supply & Sanitation Collaborative Council
- http://www.wsscc.org/
- Water, Engineering and Development Centre
- http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/cv/wedc/index.htm
- Water, Environment and Sanitation, UNICEF
- http://www.unicef.org/programme/wes/
- World Bank Group:
- Water Supply and Sanitation Program:
- http://www.wsp.org/ and http://www.worldbank.org/watsan/
- Water Resources Management Group:
- http://lnweb18.worldbank.org/essd/essdext.nsf/18ParentDoc/
WaterResourcesManagement?Opendocument
- World Health Organization (WHO) Water and Sanitation Group
- http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/index.html
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