Sense of Ownership in Municipal Water Provision and Management: The Case of Tabata Community Water Supply in Dar es Salaam

Authors

  • Alphonce Kyessi
  • Abdi Ka’Bange

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.61538/ardj.v1i1.623

Abstract

The last decade of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of the use of community participation in various development activities as a means to achieve sustainability of projects and programmes initiated. Community mobilisation and participation was employed to create trust, self-help spirit and, more importantly, the sense of ownership of projects and programmes. Sensitisation of the people that the services belong to them and that they are duty bound to participate and contribute in the construction process and maintain them after construction was greatly done. Community-based water supply initiative in Tabata is one of the community efforts in which community participation was widely employed. This paper explores the developed sense of ownership and its implication to project sustainability. It further identifies the actors involved, their contribution and significance in the projects development and management. The paper also draws implications related to community projects using water supply as the unit of analysis. It also gives recommendations for enhancement of building a sustained sense of ownership in community projects to make them more sustainable. The purpose is to inform the policy makers, researchers, local communities’ leaders on the factors to be considered in planning for community projects. Study findings reveal that existence of the collective interest and the subsequent collective actions coupled with the use of participatory methodology are important for building a substantial sense of ownership to community members. However, existence of limiting factors such as lack of incentives, discontinuation of the service to the people, and lack of regular community activities which involve people resulted into declining sense of ownership and hence project development was inhibited. The sustainability of the project has been negatively affected, whereby only 22 percent of the water points were properly functioning, 17 percent damaged and 61 percent had not been functioning for more than one year. To redress the situation, it is recommended that communities should be involved in community activities on regular basis and participatory community works should be reviewed on regular basis for improvement to develop a feeling of being valued. This could be done by giving responsibilities to the people in community activities on continuous basis, and developing multiple sources of funds to finance operation and maintenance. 

Author Biographies

Alphonce Kyessi

Institute of Human Settlement Studies, Ardhi University, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Abdi Ka’Bange

Institute of Human Settlement Studies, Ardhi University, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. 

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