A section of Mathare slums in Nairobi. FILE PHOTO | NMG
Imagine having to choose between buying food, paying house rent or servicing water and sewerage connection fees. All these are essential, but lack of money means you can only forgo some. Yet, this is the kind of dilemma facing thousands of poor people living in informal settlements across Kenya. Many of them mainly engage in menial jobs and struggle to budget for essentials such as food, shelter, healthcare and water from their daily earnings of Sh200 or less. Let us take a scenario where a household plans to feed and clean each day.
A standard two-kilo pack of unga retails for about Sh120 while a household meal would require a bunch of sukuma wiki which sells for about Sh40 to Sh50. For clean water, it would cost about Sh20 to Sh30 for each 20-litre jerrican and a household would need about four of these each day to cook and clean.
Clearly food and water expenses alone overshoot the household budgets in informal settlements across Kenya – areas which also experiences high poverty, crime and pollution rates, runaway population growth, unequal distribution of resources and services, undignified housing and conflicts over resources.
Weighed down by costs, most households choose to pay for food and shelter and look for alternative sources of water such as shallow and unprotected wells and boreholes. They also avoid pay-for-use toilets and instead dispose of waste in plastic bags—commonly referred to as “flying toilets”.
The result of this is untold desperation —faced with the risk of contagious diseases or huge budgets for clean water which is primary for households which rely on it for both domestic and commercial use such as cleaning and cooking.
Different interventions have been mooted to try and address this situation. For example, the Kenya Informal Settlement Improvement Project (KISIP) has helped to improved access to clean water in informal settlements by laying water pipes, provision of tanks, yard taps, water kiosks, installation of ablution blocks among other interventions.
This has in turn improved water and sewerage connections resulting in fewer “flying toilets.” Reliable water supply in these habitats has also seen landlords with financial capacity install improved toilets in their buildings which have boosted hygiene levels.
Apart from the cost saving from water expenditure, residents in the informal segments have also reported massively reduced round trip duration to water points, with young girls and women who were previously typical water collectors, now spending the “saved” time on other household or economic activities.
Despite these efforts and benefits that have accrued from them, there still a lot of ground that remains to be covered. The uptake of water and sewerage connections in these informal dwellings has for example not picked up as envisaged despite wide consultations with water and sewerage companies which offer the services.
Billing has emerged as a key setback to connectivity to water and sewerage services in many informal settlements.
The standing charges — the minimum monthly charge regardless of consumption — by the water and sewerage companies were particularly identified as a barrier to connection even when the project had offered subsidised water meters and negotiated for connections under the low-income consumers (LICs) arrangement with the water companies.
Many residents in these informal settlements have argued that the standing charges remain way above their reach as they juggle with other pressing basic needs.
Some of the landlords who have installed improved water and sewerage systems have also thrown a spanner in the works by passing on their costs to tenants.
How then can water and sewerage connections be made both accessible and affordable? Further dialogue and engagement with the water companies could help unlock this impasse and support deepening of accessibility to these services.
Such deliberation would centre on diverse strategies that would lower the cost burden on the financially weak population in the informal settlements.
Firstly, as a short-term measure, the water companies could provide water cheaply through vendor kiosks even as long-term solutions to the billing concerns and water rationing are sought. Water kiosks are cheaper to set up and run as common supply point for large numbers of users.
Secondly, attention should focus on finding water storage solutions for households in informal settlements — which could help eliminate the risk of paying a premium for services out of desperation.
Water storage stabilises the market and locks out cartels who thrive on desperate situations to profiteer through irrationally inflated cost of the key commodity. The water can be stored in communal tanks or individually by households using small drums and other smaller containers.
Additionally, awareness creation and enforcement by county public health officers could enhance sewer connections as the legal alternative to hiring youth to manually exhaust pit latrines into the sewer lines.
The connections fees for sewerage are perceived as high as a one-off payment and a LICs approach on the sewerage connections could be adopted. The water and sewerage companies should also improve on the reliability of services to customers.
The writer is Urban Management & Monitoring and Evaluation specialist at Kenya Informal Settlement Improvement Project (KISIP). email: [email protected]
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