Financing Small Piped Water Systems in Rural and Peri-Urban Kenya

World Bank

Washington, DC

关键词: ACCESS TO FINANCE;    ACCESS TO FINANCING;    ACCESS TO WATER;    ADMINISTRATIVE COSTS;    AFFORDABILITY;   

RP-ID  :  64641

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

In Kenya, community run small-scalewater systems play a critical role in supplying andimproving access to water services in peri-urban and ruralareas. This is largely because municipally-owned waterservices providers currently supply only 25 per cent of thecountry's population and 39 per cent of the populationwithin their service areas. Historically, under acentralized institutional structure, a large number ofcommunities were tasked with managing and recovering theoperating costs of small piped water supply systemsinstalled by government. The importance of these communityproviders has been recognized in recent reforms of thesector. These provide for a legal and regulatory frameworkfor community based organizations to engage in water serviceprovision outside major towns and cities. However, a host ofproblems complicate efforts to support these communityorganizations to become reliable service providers,including their limited management capacity, low operatingrevenues and lack of access to finance. Efforts to licenseand regulate the operations of community water projects havebeen hampered by the slow implementation of policies aimedat decentralizing water service delivery to communities inareas not covered by municipal water services providers. Inspite of considerable liquidity within the Kenyan financialsector, domestic banks do not typically finance investmentsin water infrastructure because of the long term nature ofinfrastructure finance and the perceived lack ofcreditworthiness of rural and peri-urban small scale waterproviders. Efforts to license and regulate the operations ofcommunity water projects (CWPs) have been hampered by theslow implementation of policies aimed at decentralizingwater service delivery to communities in areas not coveredby municipal water services providers. With the considerablepublic financial resources available in the water sector,the size of the market for a loan linked product is likelyto be limited over the medium term. However, public fundsare not sufficient to build the infrastructure required toeffectively meet the demand for water services: hence theincreasing focus on cost recovery tariffs and theconsiderable initiatives underway to access supplementaryfinancial resources from the private sector.