The high cost of water leads many, including children, to resort to unsafe sources.
Credit: Jocelyne Sambira/IRIN |
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By virtue of its location in Africa's Great Lakes region, Burundi has abundant water resources for its seven million people. However, most Burundians, especially in rural areas, lack clean drinking water.
While at least 75 percent of Burundi’s 493,000 urban residents have their water delivered by the state-owned utility, Regideso, most Burundians are outside Regideso’s supply grid and get water from lakes, rivers and swamps. The country is far from achieving the United Nations' minimum international standard one tap for every 500 people.
Collete Nibitanga, a resident of Buyengero Commune in the southern province of Bururi, said she could not find a single tap along the 20km road between Buyengero and Rumonge town. "People just drink water from marshes that are progressively drying up," she said.
The administrator of Buyengero, Innocent Ngendambizi, said there were only 14 taps serving the town's 20,000 inhabitants, which amounts to one tap for every 1,400 people. Some people had to walk several kilometres to fetch water.
Poor maintenance of Regideso’s supply network is partially to blame. "In some locations, pipes have burst, leading to wastage of large quantities of water," Ngendambizi said.
"Water taps in households, public institutions - such as boarding schools, universities, prisons, garrisons and various ministries - continue to leak day and night, further squandering the rare resource," said Liberat Nsabimana, director of water distribution at Regideso.
The water utility has launched a radio campaign urging consumers to be more careful about water consumption, but it had not made much difference, he said.
Devastating effects of war and poverty
Burundi's 13-year civil war seriously damaged Regideso’s assets and has limited the utility’s ability to provide services.
"Almost all public taps are not functioning, for they were destroyed," said François Sindimwo, Regideso's commercial manager. Moreover, the company had incurred heavy losses because most public institutions had stopped paying their bills, he said.
Before civil war broke out in the early 1990s, Regideso supplied drinking water to 92 percent of the urban population. There are no signs that the current decline in service will turn around. Donors, who withdrew funding during the war, have not come forward with aid to improve water delivery. An uncertain outcome of ongoing peace talks between the rebel Forces Nationales de Liberation and the government could still scare donors away.
Poverty also impedes the provision of water to every citizen. Sindimwo said that even though water rates in Burundi were one of the lowest in the Great Lakes region, the poor could hardly afford the average cost of 233 Burundian francs (US $0.23) per cubic metre of water.
"Only the rich can afford to buy the water, and the cost keeps on increasing," said Jeanne d'Arc Habonimana, a resident of Buyenzi.
Lake Gacamirinda in the north-western region of Bugabira in Burundi is slowly drying up due to over exploitation and poor water infrastructure.
Credit: Jocelyne Sambira/IRIN |
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In mid-July, Burundi’s government hiked water rates to 354 francs ($0.35) per cubic metre. Heavy users – including commercial, industrial and public institutions such as schools, military barracks and prisons - are now charged more than poor households, which usually consume less than a cubic metre a day.
Burundi’s water policy for 2004-2006 has the overall objective of supplying water in adequate quantities and quality to all socioeconomic sectors. It also includes taking measures to protect the natural resource, find new sources of water and manage them efficiently. "This will enable us to determine how much money we need to invest to deliver water to the public and to fix damaged water installations," said Gaston Ntawunkunda, the general manager of the Department of Hydraulics and Rural Energy, under the Ministry of Energy.
Another major constraint to providing safe water has been the public’s attitude. Nsabimana said most consumers believed that water sources were infinite and did not understand that bringing the resource to them costs money.
"Water is to them a gift of God that should be supplied free of charge," he said. "The Burundian consumer finds it hard to spend half a dollar to buy more than six cubic metres of drinking water but spends a similar amount just to buy one bottle of beer."
Nsabimana said the tariffs were set at a level to dissuade public misuse of the commodity and to cover the cost of maintaining infrastructure.
No privatisation plan
To overcome inefficiency in the state-run water utility, the government considered privatising Regideso in 2000. However, the project stalled because the government of President Pierre Buyoya had allocated 50 percent of the country’s budget to the military to fight rebels. The new government, in place since August 2005, has not ruled out the privatisation of the water utility.
"We have not abandoned it," Nsabimana said.
Privatisation was a condition set by donors before they would disburse financial aid to all sectors of the economy. Nsabimana said the better alternative to privatisation at this stage, however, would be to establish state-private sector 'partnerships' by assigning some water projects to private companies. This had been the case in the extension of the peri-urban water network at Sororezo in eastern Bujumbura and at Musaga, in the south of the city, he said. In the southern province of Makamba, private operators had been contracted to search for new water sources.
Ntawunkunda said privatisation goes against government's policy to provide water cheaply to the entire nation. "If water is systematically privatised, poor neighbourhoods will not get a drop," he said. "The cost for water will increase, prompting people to resort to unsafe sources."
Some consumers, however, believed privatisation would establish a more dependable water supply. "As the private companies target rapid profit margins, they would implement projects at once, and the beneficiaries would take advantage of this," said Jean de Dieu Habonimana, a teacher in Bujumbura's Bwiza commune.
Moves to boost access
With privatisation on hold, other efforts are being made to increase access to piped water.
Nsabimana said that in the wake of democratic elections in August 2005, donors were returning to the country and showing interest in the water sector. Some projects were already underway.
Work to rehabilitate dams in the countryside would begin "soon", he said, adding that lakes in the north could supply water to provinces such as Kirundo and Muyinga. There were other locations where hydroelectric dams could be built to pump drinking water, he said.
In addition, an eight-month, $18 million national water supply and sanitation project is to be set up with support from the African Development Bank. It will evaluate the water and sanitation resources in Burundi and determine the funding needed to guarantee access to piped water in every province until 2015. The project will also provide money, pumping equipment and maintenance training and suggest ways to decentralise water management and encourage community participation in maintaining water installations and ensure regular community contributions to maintain them.
A survey on the existing and potential drinking-water sources in rural and urban areas has already been prepared by the Energy Ministry. It includes information on the potential of tap and ground-water sources and rainwater stores, drinking-water networks and the administrative structure of communal water boards.
A $12.8 million, four-year project is to be launched in August and financed by Germany to supply drinking water to residents in Rutana, Cankuzo and Kirundo provinces.
The provinces of Bururi, Gitega, Kayanza and Muramvya will also be served through a project of rehabilitation and extension of water infrastructures with a $21 million disbursement from the African Development Fund.
Ntawunkunda said Belgium was set to invest $2.4 million in drinking-water projects. The funding will support construction of 75 ground-water installations in Rutana, Ruyigi and Cankuzo provinces. The project, expected to take 16 months, will be completed at the end of February 2008.
Ntawunkunda’s general water-management team for rural areas had already received $800,000 under the World Bank's Highly Indebted Poor Countries Initiative. A five-month project, which would begin in September, will supply drinking water to the provinces of Gitega, Ngozi, Bujumbura Rural, Bubanza and Cibitoke.
The average cost for a rehabilitated water infrastructure is $10,000 per kilometre, while the cost for a new water-pipeline infrastructure is $18,000 per kilometre, Ntawunkunda said.
A law would be tabled in parliament to set guidelines for organisations and individuals investing in the drinking water sector, according to Ntawunkunda. "They will have to obtain a licence allowing them to work in the sector in a move to end to the existing anarchy in the water sector," he said.
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