This week 250 practitioners and policy makers from the Uganda Water and Environment sector met for 3 days during the annual Joint Sector Review Meeting. In my previous blog I focused on the challenge of stagnation in rural water: for the past years we haven’t seen any increase in coverage and functionality and even the spent budget for rural has remained at best at the same level over the years.
It is the graphs that got my attention. And I wonder, do they show that the quality of water services is not good enough? Hence your conclusion to professionalise, which we assume to result in better quality services. Or is it the fact that people are willing to pay for phones and are not willing to pay for water? Is it the quality of service or is it a matter of priorities? Would professionalisation result in greater willingness to pay? Any idea?
I think the main point to take home from the graph is that people in principle do have the cash to pay their water fees. Whereas many politicians still argue that rural people are too poor to pay for water. The willingness to pay will very much depend on the service level, as has been shown by numerous demand assessment studies worldwide. Assuming that professionalization will improve service levels (in particular reliability), in this logic payment should go up.