A functioning water point five years after construction is a governance outcome, not an engineering one. Our fieldwork across arid and semi-arid counties traced exactly where that governance holds and where it fails.
We surveyed community water point committees across water-scarce districts, comparing functionality rates against the strength of each committee’s mandate: whether it could legally set and enforce tariffs, access spare-part supply chains, and call on a responsible authority when a repair exceeded its own capacity.
Committees with clear, legally recognised mandates sustained functionality at meaningfully higher rates than those operating on informal community consensus alone — even controlling for the technical quality of the original installation. The gap widened further out from the point of construction, which suggests informal arrangements degrade under stress in ways formal ones do not.
Tariffs are a governance instrument, not just a revenue line
Where committees could set and revise tariffs without external sign-off, cost-recovery for minor repairs was consistently faster. Where tariff-setting required approval from a distant authority, minor faults were more likely to accumulate into major failures simply because the money to fix them arrived too late.
The policy implication is specific rather than general: sustainability programming in arid zones should prioritise codifying committee mandates and local tariff authority ahead of, or at minimum alongside, the infrastructure investment itself.