Abstract
Water supply in African cities is challenged by inadequate maintenance and repair of water infrastructures. This challenge impacts water quality, quantity, reliability, and urban water systems' overall resilience and sustainability. Despite the pivotal role of maintenance and repair in water supply, policymakers and infrastructure managers in African cities tend to
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overlook the need to pay more attention to them in water policy formulation, resource allocation, and programs. Recent studies on urban water infrastructures in the global South primarily concentrate on sociotechnical heterogeneity and hybridity in access to infrastructures but rarely interrogate how those sociotechnical arrangements influence maintenance and repair practices. Contributing to this gap is essential to understanding the complex relationships in service delivery and how urban infrastructures work in the context of the global South. Furthermore, while it is well documented that maintenance and repair practices affect urban infrastructure operations, their specific impact on water infrastructure resilience in African cities needs to be better understood, especially considering the additional risks posed by infrastructure decay and aging networks.
This study addresses these gaps by examining the role of maintenance and repair in responding to the chronic water problems faced by inhabitants of Accra and Dar es Salaam – two fast-growing African cities where water access is a major challenge. Through qualitative methods such as semi-structured interviews and observations, the research explores how sociotechnical arrangements within and beyond the water network influence maintenance and repair practices, the dynamics of labor relations between public and private workers, the influence of donor funding schemes, and how these practices affect infrastructure resilience in both cities. By focusing on these aspects, the study aims to provide a nuanced insight into the complex relationship between sociotechnical arrangements in water supply and maintenance and repair and their impacts on infrastructure resilience in African cities.
The study’s key findings highlight significant differences between Accra and Dar es Salaam regarding their water supply systems, organization of maintenance and repair, and levels of knowledge regarding water system maintenance. For example, Accra employs a centralized approach to maintenance and repair, while Dar es Salaam adopts a more decentralized approach. However, both cities face challenges stemming from donor funding schemes, leading to a high reliance on expensive imported spare parts and inadequate maintenance and repair practices. The involvement of both private and public plumbers in maintenance and repair is identified as critical for enabling resilience, although it poses regulatory challenges.
The study concludes that maintenance and repair are crucial for supporting technical functionality and the resilience and sustainability of urban water systems. Policy reforms are recommended to incorporate both centralized and decentralized approaches to maintenance and repair, encourage collaboration between public and private sectors, and promote decentralized strategies to enhance the responsiveness and effectiveness of maintenance and repair efforts in African cities and other regions of the global South.
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