The Shortcomings of Market-Based Approaches in Nairobi, Kenya

Following on from blog post 6, where I spoke of numerous inadequacies among urban services in Nairobi, Kenya, and a solution to the problem of a lack of sanitation facilities, namely that provided by SC Johnson with Community Cleaning Services (CCS), this post will unravel the underlying principles behind market-based approaches to development in order to assess their effectiveness. The aim is to find out whether market-based approaches are an adequate alternative to state-controlled systems of provision.

In order to refresh your memories, I will provide a quick recap of what CCS was and what it did: CCS, sponsored by SC Johnson, was an innovative market-based approach to deal with the limited availability of safe sanitation services in the slums of Nairobi. CCS employed around twenty young individuals to provide a cleaning service within their communities, operating on over one-hundred toilets. Thus, this project was dedicated to improving the state of sanitation in Nairobi’s slums, while also providing entrepreneurial prospects for the younger generation (Thieme and DeKoszmovszky, 2012).

CCS' youthful employees. Source: Washplus Resources

From what I can gauge from reading around this specific market-based approach to improve the situation of access to safe sanitation facilities in Nairobi, Kenya, is that it is one which had substantial potential, but was, perhaps unsurprisingly, plagued with similar problems to market-based development practices world over. As promoting development was not the sole objective for every involved stakeholder, and there was always concern in regard to profits, this business, which turned a basic human need into an opportunity, failed to deliver. Due to unforeseen circumstances, including issues in regard to payment habits and certain cultural dynamics about men entering the home of a woman without her husband being present, this particular scheme had to seize its operations in 2012, seven years after its inception (Thieme, 2015).

This corporate-led development scheme is likely to be viewed as a business failure for a number of reasons. First, its participatory nature perhaps caused there to be inefficient business management. For instance, an inadequate payment method arguably heightened concerns over money flows and profits. Second, its profit-dominated focus and privatisation of cleaning services diverted attention away from the objective of improving sanitation facilities. However, depending upon someone’s background, their opinion on CCS’ operation can differ. A practitioner focusing on sustainability may view the development scheme as a socially responsible agenda, in which a business approach was applied in order to promote entrepreneurial opportunities and the improvement of sanitation facilities (Cross and Street, 2009). And others might regard CCS as ‘business innovation’ (Thieme, 2015), one which combines job creation with human welfare, and sets a precedent for other similar initiatives. The commodification of this basic service can, therefore, be applauded.

However, from a geographer’s perspective, a departure from an approach which considers safe water and sanitation facilities as economic goods will, arguably, provide a more effective, development-focused strategy (Bakker, 2007). The practice of participatory development, inaugurated by, for example, socially responsible development organisations, is arguably a more appropriate approach to improving inadequate sanitation services in Nairobi, and the rest of the developing world. Indeed, this is because the commodification and marketisation of basic goods and services must have an adequate cost-recovery or profit-making infrastructure – a formality which draws attention away from the primary development objectives – so that the initiatives are economically maintainable (WSP 2010).

Initiatives which encourage engagement from community actors, which are not founded nor sponsored by commercial companies, are both more balanced and morally attractive. The initiatives will be adapted to avoid similarities with failed top-down approaches, and will be based around ideologies of equality and empowerment (Hickey and Mohan, 2004).

Nevertheless, participatory approaches to development are not without their own problems and inadequacies. This is an issue which requires some careful consideration and will therefore be the primary focus of my next blog post. Therefore, in the next blog in this series, I will be focusing on the effectiveness of participatory approaches to development, with a specific consideration towards the provision of safe water and sanitation facilities in Sub-Saharan Africa.

19 November: World Toilet Day

This blog in this series of posts on water and sanitation is now going to take a slight interlude and, today, focus on what was the 16th World Toilet Day.

‘Minuscule masterpieces for World Toilet Day’ – Timbuktu, Mali. Source: WaterAid

For the vast majority of the world’s population, having a toilet, or more than one toilet, within your house is a given. This should come as no surprise as needing to use the bathroom is an incident that occurs a handful of times each day and thus it makes perfect sense to have the required facilities nearby. However, for many, ‘having a toilet in one’s home is a distant aspiration’ (Thieme 2016). There are numerous issues of access to sanitation which often revolve around cost and safety.

Since 2001, the 19th of November has been labelled World Toilet Day, in order to promote the importance of confronting ‘the oft-neglected global sanitation crisis’ (UN 2016). The toilet, albeit previously a taboo subject, has become a sort of poster child to spark a global interest in the situation of access to sanitation facilities. Unquestionably, this phenomenon is worthy of this intensified attention, as poor provision is a leading cause of disease in Sub-Saharan Africa and developing countries world over, with 2.4 billion people across the world living without access to improved sanitation (UN 2016).

This year’s particular theme revolves around ‘toilets and jobs,’ and how ‘toilets play a crucial role in creating a strong economy’ (World Toilet Day 2016). The United Nations recognises the fact that inadequate sanitation puts a large strain on economic development, estimating that poor sanitation can account for a 5% loss in GDP for many countries within Sub-Saharan Africa. Thus improved sanitation offers itself as a preemptive measure to avoid this burdensome result.

However, what needs to happen beyond World Toilet Day is a wider recognition and appreciation of what the toilet stands for, if we are going to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 6: to ‘ensure access to water and sanitation for all’ (UN 2015).

Journalist Rose George looked into many hidden but important topics during a Ted Talk in 2013. During the conference, she urges everybody to look at this problem as the “urgent, shameful issue that it is.” Rose concludes by saying the solution to all of this is “easy” and that we all need to “go out, protest, and speak about the unthinkable and talk shit.”

Let’s talk crap. Seriously. Source: Ted Talk

The next post is going to look closely into sanitation projects and their effectiveness in Sub-Saharan Africa, with a particular focus on Nairobi, Kenya.


To find out more about World Toilet Day, visit: www.worldtoiletday.info

Making Comparisons in Nairobi, Kenya

“The global sanitation crisis is rapidly urbanising” – McFarlane et al. (2014)

Like in Tanzania, the rapid urbanisation of Kenyan cities is causing all sorts of problems in regard to the situation of access to safe water and sanitation facilities. Rapid urbanisation has left cities in Kenya without the ability to cope with the enormous demand for basic services to the extent that only 81.65% of the urban population are served with improved water (WHO/UNICEF 2015). As is possible to see by referring to Figure 1, the situation is worsening in Kenya while improving in Sub-Saharan Africa. This lack of provision means ‘some 15 million city dwellers lack access to a piped water supply or sanitation services’ (WSUP, 2016).

Figure 1: Graph showing urban population served with improved water (%). Source: WHO/UNICEF (2015)

This shortage of adequate urban services is exaggerated in low-income regions, as a large proportion of the population is forced to settle in illegal and informal settlements WSUP (2016). In Nairobi, Kenya’s capital city, the situation of access to safe water and sanitation facilities is especially bad in urban slums, where services are scarce, costly, and uncertain.

Nairobi is home to Africa’s largest urban slum, known as the Kibera slum. Kibera is an informal settlement without the full provision of basic urban services, such as water and sanitation facilities. The inadequate provision of services in Kibera is a result of numerous factors, including:

The unwillingness of the post-colonial government to accept the legitimacy of the growing settlements it inherited, the unregulated context of vendors and landlords building enterprise on shaky rights, and the rise and fall of gangs and cartels operating with connections to city government (Crow and Odaba, 2009).

Within Kibera, like in every other locality with inadequate water and sanitation infrastructure, a longstanding taboo surrounding bodily waste has caused ‘a lack of attention to urban inequalities’ (Jewitt, 2011). Issues surrounding the discussion of bodily waste have meant limited sanitation services continue to persist in Kibera, and Nairobi as a whole. This is to the extent that only 31.23% of the urban population are served with improved sanitation (WHO/UNICEF 2015).

The burdensome access to sanitation facilities calls on authorities and organisations to create and employ responsive schemes and strategies to relieve disadvantaged individuals and households of their enduring problems. One innovative market-based approach, sponsored by SC Johnson, in the slums of Nairobi, including Kibera, was a scheme known as Community Cleaning Services (CCS). Under this intervention, young individuals would provide a cleaning service within their communities. This project was dedicated to improving the state of sanitation in Nairobi’s slums, by operating on around 100 toilets, while also providing entrepreneurial prospects for the younger generation (Thieme and DeKoszmovszky, 2012). This is an example of how an inclusive, participatory, and empowering scheme, otherwise known as a bottom-up approach, can help improve the situation of access to safe water and sanitation in Sub-Saharan Africa.

However, there are shortcomings with this particular scheme; issues which I will delve into in my next blog post, where I will also discuss the effectiveness of other solutions to a limited provision of water and sanitation services in Nairobi, Kenya.

Services and Supply Chains in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

As I alluded to in the previous blog post, water supply in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, is highly undependable. Throughout the city, there are persistent breakdowns in the production of water, disruptions to power, and the deterioration of piped networks. Problems which have been exaggerated by the effects of climate change. Droughts, in particular, have triggered severe devastation to the water networks (Mushi, 2013).

For this reason, sizeable areas within the city continue to exist unserved by the water utility, namely The Dar es Salaam Water and Sewerage Authority (DAWASA), and many of those households which do have access to the piped system have to endure an unreliable service. Consequently, small-scale domestic, private, and informal suppliers of water have been driven to show agility in response to deficiencies in the DAWASA network (UNDP, 2011), and now provide a basic yet fundamental service for many, especially the urban poor whom are detached from the piped network and would otherwise not be reached.

In most cases where urban water utility is notoriously insufficient, residents exploit all their resources and conjure up approaches to manage with the unreliable or intermittent supply of water (Nganyanyuka, 2014). However, in Dar es Salaam, the outcome has been a somewhat inefficient, ineffective, and costly service, which strongly penalises the already urban poor. The informal service that has arisen from the inadequate public supply of water is very disjointed, with many drawn-out supply chains.

According to the UNDP (2011), this has resulted in many low-income households, which are situated far away from the DAWASA utility infrastructure, purchasing water from vendors ‘at the end of the private supply chain at a price equivalent to over US$17/m3,’ a price almost thirty times as much as what is paid by a household which is connected to the DAWASA piped network (US$0.59) (Foster and Briceño-Garmendia, 2010). These lower-income households do not pay such prices because they have the money and ability to do so, but because, in most cases, there is no other alternative. Gaining access to water is a priority in every household, regardless of economic worth.

Water vendor in Dar es Salaam. Source: Humanosphere

Thus, the small-scale domestic, private, and informal suppliers of water in Dar es Salaam present an enormous policy challenge. Regardless of the significant role they play in increasing water access for the residents of the city, the vast majority of independent providers are not regulated. For instance, the price of the water is solely decided by the provider’s own discretion and the quality of the water is rarely checked.

Hence, at one time and the same time, private vendors offer an indispensable service which supports many in low-income regions, yet are a burden to the provision of long-term, inclusive, and consistent water supplies in the city. According to the UNDP (2011):

They provide an essential service to a large proportion of Dar es Salaam’s residents and support livelihoods in low-income areas … [but] at the same time, they are a manifestation of a vastly inefficient system that is fragmented, individualized and extremely regressive.

This post has tried to illustrate some of the pros and cons of private efforts to supply water in a city ridden with water access problems. However, to take this example in Dar es Salaam as illustrative of all private efforts is not sufficient. In the next post in this series, I will be exploring a different example of an adaptive response to a limited supply of water, showing either similarities or differences in approaches.

Informing the Debate: Water Access in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Given the path this blog series is beginning to take (looking into the implications of rapid urbanisation and the adopted solutions in urban regions among Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)), I have decided it is an appropriate time to introduce a site-specific case-study example in order to supplement the blog posts I have done so far. Having spent some time in Tanzania, and more specifically Dar es Salaam, I want to take this opportunity to enrich my understanding of the country and city, knowing the nation has sizeable problems in regard to the provision of water services.

In developing countries world over, society’s access to safe drinking water continues to be a major challenge for policymakers and governing bodies. This unfortunate situation of access to safe drinking water seems to be exaggerated among nations in SSA, where just 61% of the population have access to improved water sources (UNICEF/WHO, 2012). Dar es Salaam, in particular, suffers from a limited access to safe drinking water, but these insufficiencies are far from new. The city’s inadequate water facilities date back to the colonial period and have not been on the receiving end of maintenance or development many times since. Thus, for most of the citizens in the city, access to safe water is poor, and in some cases nonexistent (Smiley, 2013).

The Dar es Salaam Water and Sewerage Authority (DAWASA) is the primary supplier of piped water in the city. The corporation owns all of the water infrastructure in Dar es Salaam. However, there are many deficiencies in the system. According to a recent report by Nganyanyuka et al. (2014), just shy of half the water produced reaches its intended target, as it is often lost as a result of decaying infrastructure and illegal extractors. This tells us the situation has not changed a great deal since the turn of the century, where, at that time, fewer than half the population received their water from DAWASA (Kjellen, 2000).

The Dar es Salaam Water and Sewerage Authority logo. Source: DAWASA

The city is also subject to rapid urbanisation; a phenomenon which is making the condition progressively worse for urban dwellers. As I mentioned in my last post, rapid urbanisation in SSA inflicts a significant challenge for the development of improved safe water supply sources to the extent that countless cities throughout SSA are struggling to meet basic infrastructural needs in regard to safe water. This is the case for Dar es Salaam; the city experiences great inadequacies in the provision of water as a major proportion of the population reside in unplanned communities, where it is notably harder to provide piped water supplies (Smiley, 2013).

This case study makes me think back to the question I originally posed on my first blog post: will disparities between Sub-Saharan Africa and more developed regions across the world widen, or will this age of rapid urbanisation bring with it solutions and opportunities?

For all the shortcomings with the formal provision of water by DAWASA, a number of alternative means to gain access to safe water have arisen. Water vending has become a major sector in the informal economy and a way to provide water in a city where pipe distribution is not available to all citizens (Nganyanyuka et al., 2014). An influential study by Kjellen (2000), suggested vending should be an interim solution, regarding the practice highly:

The private, commercial and community initiatives compensate for the shortcomings of the public water distribution system, and should be seen as a complement towards meeting city dwellers’ demand.

However, the water access situation in Dar es Salaam is still inefficient and ineffective. More recent studies by Sarah Smiley (2013) and Nganyanyuka et al. (2014) highlighted the fact many households were supposedly the recipients of clean water on paper, yet in reality they faced issues of water contamination or an undependable or expensive source of access.

Thus, the current state of water access in Dar es Salaam leaves a lot to be desired. For all the interventions, disparities only appear to be widening between Dar es Salaam and more developed nations, as conditions worsen in the city.