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.