Influence of Water Fund to Sustainability of Community Managed Rural Water Supply Projects: Moshi District, Northern Tanzania

Abstract

Water financing is one of the major factors, which determine the sustainability of rural water supply projects in Sub-Saharan Africa including Tanzania. This study investigated how financing aspects affect the sustainability of community managed rural water supply projects. The study was conducted in Moshi district Council in Kilimanjaro region, northern Tanzania whereby two different types of management models i.e. the Board of Trustees and the Water Users Associations were used for data collection during the study. Purposeful sampling was used to get a total of 157 community water users who were interviewed.  Six groups of 10 key informants each participated in focus group discussions and 6 key informants were involved in in-depth interviews. These respondents represented a population of 141,386 people in the case study area. The transect walk was also used in the service area to learn about the service level, users satisfaction, quality of water infrastructure, the status of water sources, availability of water service at the public toilets, household connections, and public water points. The analysis of the findings provided the evidence that water fund collected is inadequate to cover operation and maintenance costs due to extremely low tariff levels, users preference of service level, weak water consumption control measures and power relations between upstream and down stream users. These results conclude that there is a relationship between water fund, sustainability, and management of rural water projects. Thus, the ingredients, which can evolve the sustainability of the community, managed projects are first the rethinking of rural water financing strategies and mechanisms and second, reviewing the effectiveness of community-based management. The study has used institutional bricolage by employing reconsideration of participatory water governance and possibilities to draw attention to local, endemic, or informal institutional approaches that might be adapted to deal with water-related concerns by shaping the knowledge, needs, interest and aspiration of rural communities.