Resource information
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.
