Drinking Water Sector in Ghana: Drivers for performance

Beyond the traditional engineering contribution to drinking water supply is that from the institutional environment, which his study focused on. The study was aimed at identifying drivers for improved performance of the drinking water sector in Ghana by examining the influence of the national macro-environment and the water supply related institutions, and the role of the water service providers and water pricing. The service providers were limited to the urban water supply and part of the community water supply (rural and small towns’ water supply), specifically the small towns water supply delivery. The service providers for the urban areas were the formal water utility, Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL) and the informal providers or alternative service providers such as vendors and tanker operators.

The main research instruments used for data collection were document review, interviews with key informants in the water sector (utilities, government agencies, regulators, external support agencies and customers) and surveys. The surveys conducted were customer perception surveys of GWCL customers, subjective performance description of GWCL functioning from the perception of GWCL staff, small towns’ financial sustainability, GWCL prices for households in different housing types and water supply services to the urban poor.

From the institutional environment, the study revealed significant political interference, which adversely affects the drinking water sector through the functioning of the service providers, water board, and in tariff setting. A positive outcome of the institutional reform in the drinking water has been the separation of policy formulation, service delivery and regulation for sector. In addition, urban and community water supply has been separated allowing each sector to use appropriate approaches for water service delivery. A less successful outcome of the reform is that urban water utility is yet to achieve the desired level of autonomy, customer orientation and accountability to the users. The urban utility does not have adequate incentives to achieve universal service coverage in a sustainable, effective, equitable and efficient manner.

The performance of the services providers were found to be poor with the contributing factors being lack of adequate funding for investment and operations, low levels of water tariffs, poor customer orientation, negative political interference in GWCL functioning, inadequate incentive systems to drive efficiency, inadequate autonomy of GWCL and poor accountability of GWCL to its client and users.

Kwabena Biritwum Nyarko was born on the 17th August 1971 in Ghana. He was enrolled in the Civil Engineering degree programme at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana in 1990 and graduated in 1994 with a first class honours. In 1996, he enrolled in the Sanitary Engineering MSc programme in UNESCO-IHE, and graduated in April 1998. His thesis was on “Water Quality Modelling: A Case study of Kumasi Water distribution Network”. In 2000, he obtained a fellowship from the Netherlands government to pursue a PhD degree within the Water and Sanitation Sector Capacity building programme in the Department of Civil Engineering, KNUST.