Water sharing, reciprocity, and need: A comparative study of interhousehold water transfers in sub-Saharan Africa

Water sharing between households could crucially mitigate short‐term household water shortages, yet it is a vastly understudied phenomenon. Here we use comparative survey data from eight sites in seven sub‐Saharan African countries (Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda) to answer three questions: With whom do households share water? What is expected in return? And what roles do need and affordability play in shaping those transfers? We find that water is shared predominantly between neighbors, that transfers are more frequent when water is less available and less affordable, and that most sharing occurs with no expectation of direct payback. These findings identify water sharing, as a form of generalized reciprocity, to be a basic and consistent household coping strategy against shortages and unaffordability of water in sub‐Saharan Africa

Advancing methods for research on household water insecurity: Studying entitlements and capabilities, socio-cultural dynamics, and political processes, institutions and governance

© 2017 Elsevier B.V. Household water insecurity has serious implications for the health, livelihoods and wellbeing of people around the world. Existing methods to assess the state of household water insecurity focus largely on water quality, quantity or adequacy, source or reliability, and affordability. These methods have significant advantages in terms of their simplicity and comparability, but are widely recognized to oversimplify and underestimate the global burden of household water insecurity. In contrast, a broader definition of household water insecurity should include entitlements and human capabilities, socio-cultural dynamics, and political institutions and processes. This paper proposes a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods that can be widely adopted across cultural, geographic, and demographic contexts to assess hard-to-measure dimensions of household water insecurity. In doing so, it critically evaluates existing methods for assessing household water insecurity and suggests ways in which methodological innovations advance a broader definition of household water insecurity

If citizens protest, do water providers listen?: Water woes in a Tanzanian town

Tanzania’s urban citizens are still insufficiently supplied with safe drinking water by their water utilities. However, instead of collectively clamouring for improvements, citizens channel their protests individually to water authorities. This paper aims to shed light on citizens’ protest strategies and the responses they elicit from the water authorities. It draws on extensive fieldwork carried out in a Tanzanian town, which revealed four protest strategies employed by citizens: “stay and speak up”, “speak up and leave”, “resignation” and “leave and remain silent.” The study reveals a substantial mismatch between citizens’ protest strategies and the formal/informal complaint mechanisms of the water authority. This has negative implications for underprivileged citizens and for broadly defined “access to water”

Accessing water services in Dar es Salaam: are we counting what counts?

A significant proportion of urban residents in developing countries has no access to public water supply and relies on unofficial, or even illegal, sources. They buy water from small scale water vendors or collect it from unimproved water sources. This paper draws on qualitative semi-structured interviews with public officials, private water providers and citizens to document details of citizens' strategies for accessing water in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. From these data, we develop a descriptive and evaluative framework to capture the complex mix of sources, uses, and intermediaries in planned and unplanned settings and by affluent and poor citizens. We assess to what extent these strategies solve access problems like quantity, quality, affordability and reliability. We conclude that statistics such as the Millennium Development Goals do not count the access to drinking water that counts for citizens. We discern a bias towards formal state or privatised city-wide systems, discounting the mostly informal, small-scale and unofficial strategies to access wate