Pump-priming payments for sustainable water services in rural Africa

A new article published in World Development discusses ways to overcome barriers to the financial sustainability of rural water services in sub-Saharan Africa.

Locally managed handpumps provide water services to around 200 million people in rural Africa. Handpump failures often result in extended service disruption leading to high but avoidable financial, health, and development costs.

A study by Johanna Koehler, Patrick Thomson and Dr Robert Hope at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment uses unique observational data from monitoring handpump usage in rural Kenya. The authors evaluate how dramatic improvements in maintenance services influence payment preferences.

Results reveal steps to enhance rural water supply sustainability by pooling maintenance and financial risks at scale supported by advances in monitoring and payment technologies.

The authors argue that there are three major barriers to achieving regular rural water user payments to promote financial sustainability:

  • Institutional barriers indicate that the organisational structure of the user group influences the regular collection of user fees from all handpump users.
  • Due to geographic barriers handpump density in certain areas can negatively impact payment behavior.
  • Operational barriers frequently cause handpumps to remain unrepaired for an extended period, discouraging users from paying, as the source is considered unreliable. This constitutes a downward spiral with the risk of long-term failure in service delivery.

Three major findings are identified to prime rural water user payments in Africa. First, a reliable and fast maintenance service is key to sustaining rural water user payments. Second, these payments are subject to demand, which is related to the spatial distribution of handpumps. Hence, clustering should be avoided for financially sustainable services and new handpump installations determined by verifiable metrics. Third, the management of community handpumps takes several forms along the public–private spectrum. Almost half of the handpumps self-organise in clubs and choose a semi-privatised model with a higher payment structure.

Understanding operational, geographic, and institutional barriers of rural water user payments contributes to developing an innovative, output-based payment model for rural water services in Africa. The real test will be if users support the introduction of a new payment system, which acknowledges the higher value for money that the new maintenance service system creates. This research indicates that the communities support such reforms if reliable services are delivered.

The findings offer pathways toward the suggested water targets of the post-2015 sustainable development agenda promoting, inter alia, universal and sustainable access to safe drinking water and raising service standards, as well as robust and effective water governance with more effective institutions and administrative systems.

The study demonstrates the need for continuous monitoring of rural water services, as well as suggesting strategies for achieving this. Water service performance data are key to defining a baseline and measuring progress toward sustainable services at the local level, for operationalising a maintenance service provider model at the supra-communal level and testing an output-based payment model at the national and international levels.

The Government of Kenya’s Water Services Regulatory Board (WASREB) acknowledges the importance of such performance data ‘enabling WASREB to ensure that satisfactory performance levels are achieved and maintained, and enhancing transparency and accountability within the rural sector’ (WASREB, 2014, p. 79). Thus, the data can support and monitor national policy goals that promote progress toward universal access and more reliable improved water services for the rural poor.

Related links

Koehler, J., Thomson, P. and Hope, R. (2015) Pump-priming payments for sustainable water services in rural Africa. World Development, 74: 397-411.

Smart Water Systems research

The Government of Kenya’s Water Services Regulatory Board Impact Report (2014)

Flood risk: making better infrastructure investments

Researchers at the Environmental Change Institute are helping evaluate and communicate best practice in national-scale flood risk analysis and long-term investment planning for flood management.

Thames barrier © Jack Torcello

Thames barrier © Jack Torcello

The FoRUM project – Flood risk: Building Infrastructure Resilience through better Understanding and Management choices – recently held two workshops to start a dialogue between scientists and stakeholders that make use of flood risk science in their work.

Paul Sayers, leading the project, explained: ‘understanding and assessing risk is a prerequisite to managing it. The ability of alternative investment strategies to reduce risk – at a regional, national or even international scale – presents particular challenges.’

The two workshops helped identify these challenges, compare alternative approaches and distil lessons from across different sectors.

The project has engaged academics and industry partners from the UK and Netherlands (including the Environment Agency, Network Rail, Rijkswaterstaat and Thames Water), as well as leading consultants from the flood and reinsurance sectors.

At the first workshop ‘Broadscale risk models’ stakeholders and researchers took an in-depth look at current methods for modelling national-scale flood risk. A second workshop aimed to get stakeholders up to speed on the most recent advances in planning long-term investment in infrastructure.

There are many different types of infrastructure that help reduce the damage caused by flooding; physical structures such as embankments and floodgates, as well as ‘natural infrastructure’ such as introducing greenspaces or managing beaches. A key challenge for water utilities and government agencies is deciding what investments to make, given uncertainties related to future flood risk.

While there have been significant developments in the last decade in how decision-makers address future uncertainty in investment planning, current practice still lags behind the latest thinking in academia. The FoRUM project is a significant step in bridging this gap.

The findings of these workshops are already influencing the future development of the tools used by the Environment Agency to support its Long Term Investment Scenarios (LTIS). Dr Jon Wicks, CH2M HILL, who is leading an Environment Agency project to scope the next generation LTIS tools, said: ‘the FoRUM workshops have been very helpful in highlighting alternative approaches and how they might be taken forward into practical application.’

The project is led by Paul Sayers and Jim Hall at the Environmental Change Institute, with support from Edmund Penning Rowsell (School of Geography and the Environment) and Rob Nicholls (University of Southampton). It is funded by Natural Environment Research Council’s Environmental Risk to Infrastructure Programme (ERIIP).

Presentations from speakers at the workshops are available to download via the links below.

Visit the FoRUM project webpages
See presentations from FoRUM Workshop 1: Broadscale risk models, Tuesday 17 March 2015
See presentations from FoRUM Workshop 2: Long term investment planning | Tuesday 5 May 2015

RCUK highlights Oxford’s ‘innovative’ smart handpumps project

The Research Councils UK is showcasing an Oxford University project which uses mobile phone technology to transmit data on handpump use in rural Kenya.

RCUK-handpump-story

Research trip to Kyuso, Kenya. L to R: Handpump mechanic in Kenya; Patrick Thomson, Oxford; Dr Rob Hope, Oxford; and Dr Peter Harvey, UNICEF.

The ‘Smart Handpumps’ project is led by Dr Rob Hope, an Associate Professor at the School of Geography and the Environment and Director of the Water Programme at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment. It is one of 13 projects funded by the seven Research Councils highlighted as ground-breaking and innovative research at the RCUK’s first ‘Research, Innovate, Grow’ conference, attended by business leaders, entrepreneurs, and policymakers.

The project, part funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, harnesses mobile phone technology to enable smart handpumps to send automated data on when and how much they are used. This flags up when they are broken so they can be fixed quickly, significantly improving waiting times for maintenance services. In rural Africa, one million handpumps supply water to over 200 million villagers. Yet up to one third of pumps are out of action at any one time.

Researchers work in two test sites in rural Kenya, Kyuso and Kwale, to resolve the problem of broken pumps and provide reliable water. From a delay of a month, the pumps at the sites are now fixed in under two days. Previously many households were paying nothing toward the service, but after a free trial many villagers are willing to pay for the new maintenance service based on past performance.

The smart pump data also show how much water the pump is using and its reliability. It is therefore possible to charge communities that use their pump less at a lower rate than those who use the pump more frequently. Equally, the first ever hourly data on observed handpump water use provides important insights into water demand and seasonal variation. For example, in both sites the researchers have evidence to show that when it rains people switch to alternative water sources which may be less safe.

Professor Rick Rylance, Chair of RCUK, said: ‘We are delighted to be holding such an exciting and engaging event to show how the UK is a world leader in research and innovation, with a reputation for excellence of which we are immensely proud. We truly punch above our weight on the global stage in terms of the quality of research we produce and its high impact on economic growth and prosperity. Strong, sustained investment in the UK research base is essential to strengthen and let fly the excellence, creativity and impact of the UK’s world leading researchers, innovators and businesses. We need to invest now to secure its future.’

The Government of Kenya has identified the translation of the research into a business model as an important contribution to their efforts to find new and sustainable ways to maintain water services. Local businesses set up by the project now gather data that monitors the performance of the agencies delivering water services in a measurable and accountable manner.

The work is expanding in Kenya, with other countries in Africa and Asia interested in adopting the model based on the evidence the project has provided on innovative engineering solutions and institutional design, including mobile water payment systems.

Research from the project has recently been published as an open access article in the journal World Development.

Koehler, J., Thomson, P. and Hope, R. (2015) Pump-priming payments for sustainable water services in rural Africa. World Development, 74: 397-411.

Read the Oxford University press release

The RCUK Research Innovate Grow event

Eleven projects featured in the RCUK event

Dr Rob Hope

Smart Water Systems research

African wetlands and climate

Dr Simon Dadson at the School of Geography and the Environment, has led a team of researchers from Oxford University, the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, the Met Office and the University of Cape Town in a project to investigate the role of African wetlands in the climate system.

Okavango River

Okavango River in Botswana © Simon Dadson

The research, which was funded by the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council and comes to an end this year, enables the calculation of river flows and inland flooding in data-sparse regions. The system is now integrated within the UK Met Office’s Unified Model suite of global and regional climate models and is being used worldwide.

The scientific impact of this work is to further understanding of how climate variability and change effects water resources availability, but also to get a better view of how patterns of changing freshwater availability affect local meteorology. The project has generated significant interest among the African environmental science community and enabled several research fellows to undertake exchange visits to Oxford, and vice versa.

Dr Dadson will build upon this work in a new project with the University of Reading which will investigate the influence of wetland-climate feedbacks on African hydroclimate.

Read the impact case study ‘How changes to inland waters impact regional climates’

Visit the project webpage and access the project data