Publication: The Future of Water in African Cities : Why Waste Water? Urban Access to Water Supply and Sanitation in Sub-Saharan Africa, Background Report
Loading...
Published
2012-12
ISSN
Date
2013-02-07
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
The main purpose of this paper is to explain the patterns of access to water supply and sanitation facilities in urban areas in Sub-Saharan Africa since the late 90's, and its relation with the performance of service providers in the case of improved water supply. It also seeks to explore the institutional context of the water supply and sanitation sectors. The paper concludes that services providers in Sub-Saharan Africa have been unable to keep up with urban population growth. Service providers are overwhelmed by the pace of urban population growth as they face high distributional losses, low billing collection, overstaffing, and under recovery of costs. The institutional frameworks are yet to be completed as there is vast political inference in service provision and regulation, as well as obstacles for effectively undertake public private partnerships. The paper is organized as follows. Section one presents definitions of water supply sources and sanitation, as well as the sources of data used for the analysis. Section two discusses the current and projected trends of urbanization, and introduces the country clustering used for analytical purposes. Section three and four present pathways of access to water supply sources and sanitation facilities -respectively- in urban areas in Sub-Saharan Africa, and discusses trends in access by country cluster. Section five explains the operational and financial performance of services providers in the region. Section six explores the existing institutional arrangements for the urban water supply and sanitation service provision. Finally, section six presents the main challenges for the future expansion of sustainable improved water supply and sanitation services.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Dominguez Torres, Carolina. 2012. The Future of Water in African Cities : Why Waste Water? Urban Access to Water Supply and Sanitation in Sub-Saharan Africa, Background Report. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/12276 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Digital Object Identifier
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Africa's Water and Sanitation Infrastructure : Access, Affordability, and Alternatives(World Bank, 2011-03-09)The Africa Infrastructure Country Diagnostic (AICD) has produced continent-wide analysis of many aspects of Africa's infrastructure challenge. The main findings were synthesized in a flagship report titled Africa's Infrastructure: a time for transformation, published in November 2009. Meant for policy makers, that report necessarily focused on the high-level conclusions. It attracted widespread media coverage feeding directly into discussions at the 2009 African Union Commission Heads of State Summit on Infrastructure. Although the flagship report served a valuable role in highlighting the main findings of the project, it could not do full justice to the richness of the data collected and technical analysis undertaken. There was clearly a need to make this more detailed material available to a wider audience of infrastructure practitioners. Hence the idea of producing four technical monographs, such as this one, to provide detailed results on each of the major infrastructure sectors, information and communication technologies (ICT), power, transport, and water, as companions to the flagship report. These technical volumes are intended as reference books on each of the infrastructure sectors. They cover all aspects of the AICD project relevant to each sector, including sector performance, gaps in financing and efficiency, and estimates of the need for additional spending on investment, operations, and maintenance. Each volume also comes with a detailed data appendix, providing easy access to all the relevant infrastructure indicators at the country level, which is a resource in and of itself.Publication Sierra Leone : Public Expenditure Review for Water and Sanitation 2002 to 2009(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2011-07)This review focuses on how public expenditure translates into the delivery of water supply and sanitation services in rural and urban areas in Sierra Leone. It describes the legal and institutional framework for the allocation of resources assesses access to Water Supply and Sanitation (WSS) services and past sector performance, and analyzes public expenditure in the sector, including the factors affecting the efficiency of use of resources, and makes recommendations. Water supply includes the supply, distribution, and usage of water for drinking, food preparation, and hygiene. Sanitation is defined as the sanitary disposal of liquid waste and the promotion of hygienic practices. The review covers the period from 2002 to 2009, a period of reconstructing after a decade of upheavals. Since 2002, democracy and a stable environment for development have been re-established in the country, especially since the 2007 presidential elections. Sierra Leone remains one of the poorest countries in the world.Publication East Asia and the Pacific Region Urban Sanitation Review : A Call for Action(Washington, DC, 2013-11)This study summarizes the main challenges to scaling up access to sustainable sanitation services in the urban areas of three countries in the East Asia and Pacific region-Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam-and proposes the main steps these countries need to take to redress the status quo. The report is divided into four chapters. The first chapter provides an overview of the current level and quality of access to urban sanitation in the region. The second chapter examines the causes leading to the current state of urban sanitation, using four thematic areas: people, technology, institutions and finance. The third chapter identifies those factors that need to be in place to trigger a different way of doing business in the sector and that may ultimately lead to transformational changes. The final chapter proposes recommendations on how countries can upgrade and scale up urban sanitation services.Publication Global Expeiences on Expanding Water and Sanitation Services to the Urban Poor : Accompanying Volume(Washington, DC, 2009-08)In 2006-07, the Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) initiated research to identify barriers to service delivery for the urban poor. The findings of the research have been presented in the Guidance Notes on Improving Water Supply and Sanitation Services to the Urban Poor in India. The Urban Global Practice Team of WSP decided to expand the ambit of this research to a global context as the learnings were relevant to experiences across Africa, Latin America, and East Asia and the Pacific. The Guidance Notes are based on an in-depth research of various initiatives from across the world (including South Asian, African, Latin American, and East Asian and the Pacific countries) and consultations with urban poor communities. The present volume is a documentation of this research and supports the Guidance Notes on Services for the Urban Poor. Section 1 of this report consists of 19 case studies. Section 2 describes consultations with urban poor communities. The main aim of the consultations was to record the issues they confronted related to water supply and sanitation.Publication Kyrgyz Republic(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-04)This note has been prepared as part of the work program on multi-dimensional poverty in the Kyrgyz Republic to raise awareness of poverty dimensions, which in turn should help accelerate the development of water supply and sanitation services, and necessary reforms in the Kyrgyz Republic. The note analyzes the quality and reliability of the Integrated Households Survey (KIHS) data to measure access to water supply and sanitation services. The household survey was conducted by the National Statistics Committee (NSC) of the Kyrgyz Republic. It is representative at the national, rural/urban, and oblast levels. Using survey data we analyze the consumption of water supply and sanitation services at the household level with a focus on access, quality, and expenditures.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Digital Africa(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-03-13)All African countries need better and more jobs for their growing populations. "Digital Africa: Technological Transformation for Jobs" shows that broader use of productivity-enhancing, digital technologies by enterprises and households is imperative to generate such jobs, including for lower-skilled people. At the same time, it can support not only countries’ short-term objective of postpandemic economic recovery but also their vision of economic transformation with more inclusive growth. These outcomes are not automatic, however. Mobile internet availability has increased throughout the continent in recent years, but Africa’s uptake gap is the highest in the world. Areas with at least 3G mobile internet service now cover 84 percent of Africa’s population, but only 22 percent uses such services. And the average African business lags in the use of smartphones and computers as well as more sophisticated digital technologies that catalyze further productivity gains. Two issues explain the usage gap: affordability of these new technologies and willingness to use them. For the 40 percent of Africans below the extreme poverty line, mobile data plans alone would cost one-third of their incomes—in addition to the price of access devices, apps, and electricity. Data plans for small- and medium-size businesses are also more expensive than in other regions. Moreover, shortcomings in the quality of internet services—and in the supply of attractive, skills-appropriate apps that promote entrepreneurship and raise earnings—dampen people’s willingness to use them. For those countries already using these technologies, the development payoffs are significant. New empirical studies for this report add to the rapidly growing evidence that mobile internet availability directly raises enterprise productivity, increases jobs, and reduces poverty throughout Africa. To realize these and other benefits more widely, Africa’s countries must implement complementary and mutually reinforcing policies to strengthen both consumers’ ability to pay and willingness to use digital technologies. These interventions must prioritize productive use to generate large numbers of inclusive jobs in a region poised to benefit from a massive, youthful workforce—one projected to become the world’s largest by the end of this century.Publication Interoperability Between Central Bank Digital Currency Systems and Fast Payment Systems(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-07-02)Central banks around the world are actively researching and investigating the benefits, challenges, and design options of wholesale and retail central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Since CBDCs are one of the most critical components of a national payment system (NPS), it is important that their interoperability with other payment systems is one of the key considerations in the design process. The ITS Technology and Innovation (ITSI) team, in collaboration with the World Banks’s Finance Competitiveness and Innovation (FCI) Global Practice, has conducted technology design experiments on two specific scenarios regarding CBDC system interoperability with fast payment systems (FPS). In the first scenario, the experiment investigated the option of settling FPS obligations in a wholesale CBDC system, including the option to reserve funds to guarantee the settlement of FPS net obligations. In the second scenario, the team investigated the interoperability between users within the FPS and retail CBDC users, including the transfer of funds among both types of users, using common services such as address resolution services. This experiment illustrated how CBDC systems can interoperate with retail payment systems through an interlinking bridge that was used to route messages and application programming interface (API) calls among different systems. The programmability features of distributed ledge technology (DLT) were used to link the settlement in CBDC to the transfer of funds in the FPS. The technical applicability for this type of interoperability was demonstrated through the experiments, with the caveat that these experiments do not take into account complexities that may be involved with live systems.Publication Global Economic Prospects, January 2025(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-16)Global growth is expected to hold steady at 2.7 percent in 2025-26. However, the global economy appears to be settling at a low growth rate that will be insufficient to foster sustained economic development—with the possibility of further headwinds from heightened policy uncertainty and adverse trade policy shifts, geopolitical tensions, persistent inflation, and climate-related natural disasters. Against this backdrop, emerging market and developing economies are set to enter the second quarter of the twenty-first century with per capita incomes on a trajectory that implies substantially slower catch-up toward advanced-economy living standards than they previously experienced. Without course corrections, most low-income countries are unlikely to graduate to middle-income status by the middle of the century. Policy action at both global and national levels is needed to foster a more favorable external environment, enhance macroeconomic stability, reduce structural constraints, address the effects of climate change, and thus accelerate long-term growth and development.Publication Lessons from the Marshall Plan(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2010-04)The Marshall Plan is invoked whenever policy makers contemplate large-scale foreign aid. A cursory Google search turns up 'A Marshall Plan for Africa,' 'A Marshall Plan for Haiti," 'A Marshall Plan for Eastern Europe,' and 'A Marshall Plan for the East.' The foreign aid program officially known as the European Recovery Program (ERP), but forever associated with the name of Secretary of State George C. Marshall, is widely regarded as a singular success. Over the four years from 1948 through 1951, the United States transferred $13 billion (roughly $115 billion at current prices) to the war-torn nations of Europe. The transfer represented approximately two per cent of U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and roughly the same share of the collective GDP of the recipient countries. The recipients, seemingly on the brink of economic collapse, mounted a strong recovery. Industrial production in the recipient European countries leapt from just 87 per cent of pre-Second World War levels in 1947 to fully 135 per cent in 1951, a 55 per cent jump in just four years. At least as importantly, the resumption of growth was sustained. Europe embarked on a 'golden age' of economic growth that spanned a period of decades. No wonder, then, that the Marshall Plan is widely regarded as the most striking historical example of a successful large-scale foreign aid program. And no wonder that there have been repeated attempts to identify the key ingredients of its success in the hope that this might be replicated in other times and places.Publication Ghana National Health Insurance Scheme(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2017-07-31)Ghana National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) was established in 2003 as a major vehicle to achieve the country’s commitment of Universal Health Coverage. The government has earmarked value-added tax to finance NHIS in addition to deduction from Social Security Trust (SSNIT) and premium payment. However, the scheme has been running under deficit since 2009 due to expansion of coverage, increase in service use, and surge in expenditure. Consequently, Ghana National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) had to reduce investment fund, borrow loans and delay claims reimbursement to providers in order to fill the gap. This study aimed to provide policy recommendations on how to improve efficiency and financial sustainability of NHIS based on health sector expenditure and NHIS claims expenditure review. The analysis started with an overall health sector expenditure review, zoomed into NHIS claims expenditure in Volta region as a miniature for the scheme, and followed by identifictation of factors affecting level and efficiency of expenditure. This study is the first attempt to undertake systematic in-depth analysis of NHIS claims expenditure. Based on the study findings, it is recommended that NHIS establish a stronger expenditure control system in place for long-term sustainability. The majority of NHIS claims expenditure is for outpatient consultations, district hospitals and above, certain member groups (e.g., informal group, members with more than five visits in a year). These distribution patterns are closely related to NHIS design features that encourages expenditure surge. For example, year-round open registration boosted adverse selection during enrollment, essentially fee-for-service provider mechanisms incentivized oversupply but not better quality and cost-effectiveness, and zero patient cost-sharing by patients reduced prudence in seeking care and caused overuse. Moreover, NHIA is not equipped to control expenditure or monitor effect of cost-containment policies. The claims processing system is mostly manual and does not collect information on service delivery and results. No mechanisms exist to monitor and correct providers’ abonormal behaviors, as well as engage NHIS members for and engaging members for information verification, case management and prevention.