ABSTRACT
By 2020, Sub-Saharan African cities will be home to half of the continent’s population, including 50 per cent in informal settlements. In a context of scarce public resources and where users cannot bear the cost of basic services alone, the water service is the most symbolic sector for this gap between urban growth and the provision of essential services. This is because it is widely subject to an economic, technical and environmental rationale (scope of infrastructure, technical system, cost of service, etc.), and comes up against strong health, social and political expectations concerning access to water. There is such a high infrastructure deficit in large African cities that water distribution systems generally only cover part of the urban fabric, leaving vast areas unserved (Collignon, 2007). The informal settlements that have sprung up over the past 30 years experience a host of difficulties: technical (narrow streets, flood-prone land, rugged topography), commercial (identification of plots, addressing), legal (clients without land titles, neighbourhoods that are not in the land registry), political (slum clearance projects often block supply projects) and institutional (it is not always clear who decides whether or not to supply these areas with services) (Collignon and Botton, 2014). Consequently, the residents of these neighbourhoods buy from informal operators who work in gap areas not covered by the main operator. For a long time, stakeholders in the water sector, especially public institutions, focused on economic considerations concerning the optimal technical system (a centralized network that necessarily allows economies of scale), the appropriate management method (water authority, delegation, semi-public company), the most effective delegation method (concession, affermage, management contract) and the right level of service (national, regional, local). They are gradually beginning to put the strength of the models that are implemented into perspective in order to observe their practices. Certain experiences, which are often heterodox with regard to theories that have shaped the sector for over 30 years, have consequently attracted attention, such as the small-scale private water providers who work in the water sector. These small-scale systems provide quality of service that is sometimes comparable to the provision of the main operator. This calls into question the main principles of the economic theory of the natural monopoly of water
services and of economies of scale, which are the cornerstones of the concept of public services for water. The study of small-scale private water providers necessarily leads to focusing on their position at the crossroads of the professional world of water distribution on the one hand, and informal settlements, with their populations, associations and political representatives, on the other hand. It shows that they appear “to play an essential role as an intermediary and interpreter between different and even contradictory rationales for action” (Crozier and Friedberg, 1977: 86).1 In addition to a normative assessment of the services they provide (“pioneers or predators?”) (Hailu et al., 2011), it is necessary to understand in what way cooperation and contractual arrangements between the main operator and small-scale providers impacts upon practices in the water sector. For some 20 years now, the literature on these small-scale providers has given no explicit definition of their function. The World Bank and Water and Sanitation Program (Snell, 1998), Asian Development Bank (Conan, 2003) and Agence française de développement (Blanc et al., 2009; Botton and Blanc, 2010) all refer to the great diversity of forms of small-scale providers.2 However, they are generally defined by their “informal”, “spontaneous” and “independent” nature;3 the urban areas where it is difficult to serve clients from low-income households with a conventional network; the high prices for services provided by resellers and the resulting unfairness, which feeds into the notion of the “poverty penalty” (Hailu et al., 2011); the flexibility of their services and the complementarity they provide with the conventional network (Solo, 2003; McGranahan and Satterthwaite, 2006). While their service is less sophisticated than the main operator’s service and is sometimes “cobbled together”, it is nevertheless functional and, especially, accepted locally (Valfrey-Viser et al., 2006). On the contrary, in this chapter it is the “regular”, “encouraged” and “coordinated” nature with the main operator that will be studied, on the basis of a comparative analysis of three large African cities (see Table 7.1): Maputo (Mozambique), Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) and Kisumu (Kenya), which have recently implemented pilot projects to delegate water services to small-scale water providers to supply outlying neighbourhoods (with financial support from Agence française de développement). These three cases have a diversity of configurations in terms of the status of the main operator, institutional functioning, and the accessibility conditions to water resources. The aim is to examine the extent to which cooperation mechanisms among official services are able to handle the technical and commercial management of water services in areas that are often deemed “physically or financially unattractive” (Ahlers et al., 2013).
