MALI: Making pipe dreams come true
BAMAKO, 13 November 2007 (IRIN) - For years, women in the Malian village Sotuba squabbled over the two state-run standpipes, having walked two or three kilometres in search of water for their families.
Then, three years ago, a young entrepreneur, Bakary Koïta, contacted the national water provider, Energie du Mali (EDM), and drilled his own private standpipe. He recruited unemployed youths to fill jerry-cans with water and take them by cart to people’s homes.
“Obviously, the price is a little higher, but the women no longer have to come all the way,” Koïta told IRIN. “The conflicts, problems and little quarrels surrounding the water points are now limited.”
Koïta is part of a long-standing trend in West Africa and the developing world for small private operators to supply water. Increasingly, researchers are recognising this potential for the future of water provision in countries where national water suppliers are failing to meet the demand in rapidly growing cities.
One billion customers
The French engineering firm Hydroconseil estimates that one billion people in the developing world, 40 million in West Africa, and at least half a million in Mali, access water through small providers.
Mostly located in small towns and in the peripheries of urban areas, they range from individuals managing a standpipe and cart-pushers delivering water, as in Mali, to those investing in more developed networks of pipes, as in Mauritania. Most are local entrepreneurs new to the water sector.
A 2006 report by Hydroconseil and Building Partnership for Development in Water and Sanitation (BPDWS), a global network of business, government and civil society, found these providers active in providing water in areas “unserved” by the national water utility - and in many cases, doing a better job.
“The surveys showed them often outperforming larger formal providers in meeting demand for household connections, usually without any external subsidies,” the report stated.
Mali, for example, has “great water-resource potential . largely superior to the country’s needs”, but it is badly managed and unevenly distributed, according to the 2007 African Economic Outlook, an annual report by the African Development Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
The UN says half of Malians have no or inadequate access to a household connection, standpipe, borehole, or protected well.
“The provision of services like water by small-scale private and local providers will be the future,” said Hydroconseil chairman Bernard Collignon.
Illicit, informal, unregulated
In Moribabougou, a suburb of the Malian capital, Bamako, private water vendor Oumar works with an old cart, a donkey and a barrel. Where 72 percent of Malians live on less than US$1 a day, he can make up to 5,000 CFA francs ($11.20) daily.
While these operators can be very successful, they do face constraints. Most are not formally recognised and operate illegally.
“[Governments] know they are there; they know they are an important part of the economic life of the country; but they don’t know how to handle them,” Collignon added.
Without licences, many are unwilling to make serious investments in the water business, for fear of being shut down or expropriated. They are also excluded from cheap loans and investment programmes. A 2005 World Bank report identified a lack of affordable financing as a constraint for most small private service providers.
Some countries, however, have been successful in formally engaging them. The Mauritanian government has built small water systems and contracted them out to 400 private providers, who serve 13 percent of the population.
Resistance
Even so, says David Schaub-Jones, co-author of the BPDWS report, the concept makes many people uncomfortable.
“People say this is creeping privatisation; this is the state abdicating its responsibilities,” he said. Others worry the services do not always meet health and engineering standards - water may be collected from unsafe sources such as rivers, analysts point out. “Another school of opinion says they are a bunch of bandits, extorting money from people who have no options.”
In Moribabougou, one private provider charges 300,000 CFA francs ($671) for installation and 3,000 francs ($6.71) per 1,000 litres.
“What to do?” asked one customer. “We don’t have any choice if we don’t want to die of thirst.”
Meeting MDGs
The authors of the report believe small-scale providers will play a crucial role in meeting the UN Millennium Development Goals - for 75 percent of sub-Saharan Africa to have access to potable water by 2015.
“In some situations - slums for example, where you have a very dense area with poor people - probably the only way to meet the MDGs will be to build the public service with private providers,” Collignon said.
These providers can fill the gap in the short to medium term, Schaub-Jones said, and eventually be incorporated into whatever longer-term framework the state creates.
The men always used to take decisions for the family, now the women are also making a contribution
developed nations to spearhead an urgent global action plan to resolve the world’s growing water and sanitation crisis. 
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