Access to water: Necessity is the mother of invention

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Water is a vital resource.

Most people who will read these lines take access to drinking water for granted, and think about it only on those rare occasions when a water main breaks.

Subconsciously, though, we know that this is not yet the case for everyone on Earth.

While substantial progress has been made in terms of reliable access to drinking water, many households around the world still have to deal with uncertain access due to inadequate infrastructure.

In Canada, over 99 per cent of the population has access to drinking water, according to data from UNICEF. Unfortunately, 33 First Nations communities are still, to this day, dealing with 35 boil-water advisories in effect for over a year.

In Ivory Coast, the comparable figure is 73 per cent—and falls to 44 per cent if we exclude community access. Despite the progress the country has made, which has increased the latter proportion by nearly a third between 2015 and 2022, there is a lot of work still to do.

For example, numerous neighbourhoods in Abidjan, the capital, are still not connected to the water supply network, or if they are, the pressure is sometimes insufficient to get the water to their home.

As the proverb goes, necessity is the mother of invention.

Faced with this state of affairs, a whole informal network of micro-entrepreneurs has set itself up in these neighbourhoods in order to provide a reliable and predictable supply of drinking water, in the absence of major infrastructure.

These small private water delivery operators are residents of these neighbourhoods who have identified the lack of water as a problem, and are working hard to remedy it in their own way, notably by ensuring delivery from a drinking water supply point to their neighbourhood clients.

Although they operate in the margins of the legal framework, these micro-entrepreneurs play an essential role in their neighbourhoods, facilitating access to water for the people who live there.

A recent study led by the MEI, Audace Institut Afrique and Canadian and Moroccan academics with support from the Templeton World Charity Foundation, looked at this phenomenon.

The researchers interviewed 1,067 of these micro-entrepreneurs in order to better understand their field, the issues that concern them, and the role they can play to address the lack of access to water.

First, it is important to recognize that the choice to pursue this occupation is above all motivated by the prospect of making money. Indeed, more than half of the respondents said they chose this sector of activity because it promised to pay better than their previous job.

Having said that, the vast majority of them (88 per cent) would like to see their trade formalized and their work officially recognized.

According to their testimony, this would allow them to secure their equipment and jobs, to obtain better access to financing, and to avoid administrative harassment.

In so far as a non-negligible portion of the population still does not have reliable access to this vital resource, despite the substantial progress in hooking people up to drinking water, formalizing and recognizing small private water delivery operators would provide a concrete solution to rapidly increase access.

For example, authorizing them to act as subcontractors for the main water distributor in Ivory Coast would have the benefit of expanding the coverage of the mini-networks installed by these small operators in poorer neighbourhoods.

Partnering with the local regulatory authorities could guarantee temporary supply in case of problems accessing the resource.

A pilot project could also be set up in the capital in order to identify, register, train, and support these micro-entrepreneurs, notably to ensure follow-up on water quality and to better understand how this sector functions.

Such formalization would notably promote better access to training, which would help improve the quality of the water distributed and better serve local populations.

In a context in which connection to formal drinking water resources is not happening as quickly as one would hope, this kind of local initiative should not be constrained, but rather encouraged.

Let’s raise a glass to human ingenuity, that inexhaustible resource.

Renaud Brossard is Vice President, Communications at the MEI. The views reflected in this opinion piece are his own.