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WATER DEMAND MANAGEMENT AND THE URBAN POOR
Madeleen Wegelin-Schuringa
IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre

1. Introduction

The provision of adequate water supply and sanitation to the rapidly growing urban populations is increasingly becoming a problem for governments throughout the world. The continuing expansion of the numbers of people in cities who need water and sanitation services and who cannot readily get these services by self provision, form a continuous pressure to either invest in additional production capacity or to stretch the available supplies to serve more people. At the same time, industrial activity also demands the expansion of urban water supply services. The water resources are threatened not only by this rapidly increasing demand but also through diminishing quality caused by pollution and saline intrusion as well as reducing quantity caused by overexploitation and denuding of water catchment areas. Finally, water demand for agricultural use in most places is also growing and competing with water availability for urban use.

The predominant approach towards meeting these increasing water demands has been towards supply augmentation schemes. But, the cost of developing new sources or expanding existing sources is getting higher and higher as the most accessible water resources have already been tapped. The real cost of water per cubic meter in second and third generation projects in some cities have doubled between a first and the second project and then doubled again between the second and third (Bhatia and Falkenmark, 1993). At the same time, governments are becoming reluctant to pay the rising investment costs as long as utilities are unable to meet these cost from user charges.

It has been demonstrated in many countries that saving water rather than the development of new sources is often the best ‘next’ source of water, both from an economic and from an environmental point of view. Water demand management therefore is seen as the preferred alternative to meet increasing water demand and can be defined as a strategy to improve efficiency and sustainable use of water resources taking into account economic, social and environmental considerations.

The main objective of water demand management is to contribute to more efficient and equitable provision of water and sanitation services and to reach this objective a number of instruments have been developed. These instruments are interdependent and mutually reinforcing and the most optimal way they are applied will depend on the prevailing local conditions and are the topic of a number of presentations in this symposium.

With regard to the domestic consumer, water demand management measures can be divided in:

1. Water conservation measures:

• Leakage detection
• Reduction of illegal connections
• In-house retrofitting
• Out-of-house water saving measures

2. Water pricing measures:

• Water metering
• Tariff structures

3. Information and educational measures:

• Awareness raising
• Public involvement
• In-school education

4. Legal measures

• Rules and regulations that form the basis of WDM policy
• Regulations on resale of water

In all cities, a distinction can be made between different income groups (high, middle and low), between the different types of urban areas they live in and hence between the different water demand management measures which are applicable. The authorities responsible for water supply mainly provide subsidized services to high and middle income areas and the inequality of access to basic services is most severely felt in low-income urban areas, where up to 60% of the urban populations are living. The focus of this paper is especially on the applicability of WDM strategies for the urban poor and on approaches to ensure that the WDM savings are indeed also used for a more equitable provision of the water supply. The water quality aspects of WDM, including monitoring of quality, are outside the scope of this paper.

2. Current provision patterns in cities in developing countries

Urban water supply coverage has actually decreased between 1990 and 1994 in parts of the developing world, an indication of urban growth but also of deterioration of existing systems.

This coverage includes house connections and access to public standpost, managed by the water utility. The overview below gives some more insight in the division between the two types of supply. The people who are not covered by the public network, are dependent on private wells or boreholes, rivers or springs, vendors or neighbours.

These percentages do not reflect the intra urban differences and do not show the desperate water situation existing in many low-income urban areas. For Jakarta, for instance, the Northern sector, which is the most disadvantaged district in terms of water supplies, the coverage was only 13% with private connection and 27% with public standpost, the remainder being dependent on water vendors and neighbourhood resale. This neighbourhood resale can address a very large percentage of water demand, for instance in Conakry, 35% of the residents obtain water from such source. Actual access to safe drinking water is likely to be lower than is reflected by the above percentages due to intermittent supply. Many residents augment the water provided by the utility with water from other sources. In general, access to utility provided water supply is dependent on location and income and different for different segments of society:

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