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 inte...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Habitat international 2014-10, Vol.44, p.358-366
Main Authors: Nganyanyuka, Kapongola, Martinez, Javier, Wesselink, Anna, Lungo, Juma H., Georgiadou, Yola
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Access to water
Citizens
Dar es Salaam
Developing countries
Drinking water
Evaluation
Informal water providers
Interviews
Millennium Development Goals
Poor
Poverty relief
Public officials
Qualitative analysis
State
Statistical analysis
Statistics
Tanzania
Water
Water supply
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Summary: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 water. •Access to water is a recognised problem with contested operational definitions.•This research documented citizens' strategies for accessing water in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.•It assesses to what extent these strategies solve access problems.•The paper concludes that statistics do not count what counts for citizens.
ISSN:0197-3975
1873-5428
DOI:10.1016/j.habitatint.2014.07.003