The challenge of sanitation amid uncontrolled growth

Yasmina Zaidman and Bhavika Vyas from Acumen Fund’s Water Portfolio are visiting East Africa to explore water and sanitation investment opportunities, starting their trip in Kenya…

During our three hour drive from Nairobi to Nakuru we witnessed an unexpected array of wildlife in patches of undeveloped land that still exists between growing towns in western Kenya. A few lone zebras look out of place outside a small but expanding settlement along the road, while Thompson’s gazelles and impala graze peacefully in a savannah in the rift valley. Bold baboons the size of German shepherds skirt the dusty semi-paved freeway between Naivasha and Nakuru, perhaps foraging for food in the garbage left behind by speeding cars. As we approach Nakuru, we pass Lake Elementia, a salt lake rimmed by white where thousands of flamingos flock. From the road, they are only a cloud of pink specks, but they are a major draw for tourists who have helped Nakuru grow into a bustling town.

While nature struggles to hold its ground in a rapidly growing country, the people who are gravitating to towns along this road and informal settlements in Nakuru, all looking for work in tourism and agriculture, face challenges of their own. As houses are built to accommodate a growing population, infrastructure fails to follow. The new towns we saw along the road may rely on contaminated river water for their water supply, and are likely to go without sanitation or sewerage of any kind. The development is uncontrolled and relentless. In Nakuru, we visit the informal settlements in the southern part of the city, where the only public provision of water supply or sanitation comes in the form of three standpipes – these are scarcely adequate to cover the needs of the one hundred and fifty thousand people who live in this settlement. In a city of half a million, there are four public toilets.

Women collecting water for their households stand in a line at one of the standpipes in the informal settlement along with private vendors who are filling as many as twenty jerry cans each for distribution in the slum. The process can take hours, and the cost per jerry can is 5 Kenyan shillings – approximately seven cents. Those who can’t take the time to wait in the queue at the standpipe, or who live too far to collect the water themselves, will pay a premium on this price. The few houses who could afford household water connections find that they haven’t provided a reliable water supply in years. Thus the demand for water from these standpipes exceeds supply, and private trucks come to the settlement to sell water as well. These challenges are common in slums the world over, but we are here today because an organization has brought us to propose an alternative.

Though it can be said that entrepreneurs are helping to fill the gap in access to water supply by privately selling water to households throughout these settlements, this does not tell the whole story of how families who live here are hit twice by lack of infrastructure. First, they are denied access to basic goods and services that they could afford to pay for, because these areas are not a development priority and funding is severely limited. This means that the services they can access will be intermittent, inconvenient and of low quality. They are hit again by vendors who can charge high prices for water of dubious quality because a truly competitive market is absent. Recent reforms to the water sector in Kenya could lead to more rapid expansion of coverage – which is currently at only 30% of the population for water and sanitation – but it will not close the gap for the hardest-to-reach communities.

We are visiting with an organization that has developed a consortium of local government, the local business association, the Nakuru water and sanitation company, and itself, along with several other stakeholders, to build a scalable and financially sustainable model for provision of sanitation and water supply in high density areas throughout Nakuru. We aim to work with them to gain access to affordable credit from local banks that can fuel the installation of the hundreds of facilities that are required. Though we are at an early stage in this conversation, we have seen the level of demand first hand and have been impressed by the collaborative efforts of this consortium. The first sanitation block in Nakuru under this model is under construction and will open in November.