Attachments
Executive Summary
Tanzania is the fourth most populous country in Sub-Saharan Africa, home to more than 55.6 million people. The country’s macroeconomic outlook is positive, with GDP growth of 6.5 percent per annum over the past fifteen years and significant reductions in poverty since 2007.
Despite this progress, 40 percent of its population, some 21 million people, lack access to improved drinking water and more than double that figure, almost 43 million people, lack access to improved sanitation. The country recently fell a long way short of reaching its Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets for water and sanitation, which was “to halve the proportion of people without improved drinking water and sanitation in 1990 by 2015.” Now, the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) aim to reach universal access to safe water and sanitation by 2030, an aspiration that appears even more daunting.
“Reaching for the SDGs: The Untapped Potential of Water Supply, Sanitation, and Hygiene in Tanzania” is a summary report of the findings of the Tanzania WASH Poverty Diagnostic (TWPD) study led by the World Bank’s Water and Poverty Global Practices team. TWPD identifies the nature of challenges of water supply, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) access in Tanzania and proposes ways to prioritize those challenges in moving forward to meet the new SDGs. It concludes that WASH must improve not only for the sake of the sector itself, but also because of the broader knock-on effects that it has on crucial dimensions of human development and poverty reduction.
TWPD discusses the country’s current development and poverty context before moving on to the ways in which poverty and WASH overlap. It then examines the different dimensions of WASH deficiencies in the country, and how these differ along economic and geographic lines. Next, it delves into specific linkages between WASH and human development, with a focus on stunting—a nutrition issue of immense importance in the Tanzanian context. It then provides an overview of the bottlenecks in the institutional and policy context that thus far have been constraining greater progress in the sector. Finally, the report offers recommendations on how to speed progress toward national and global objectives with a focus on the bottom 40% of the wealth distribution (B40).
This Executive Summary provides an overview of the key messages and recommendations of the work conducted.
Key Messages
Message 1: Tanzania Faces Ambitious SDG Targets for Water and Sanitation against a Backdrop of Low Coverage and Slow Progress during the MDG Era
The SDGs call for universal access to safely managed water and sanitation by 2030. Beyond providing technologically improved water and sanitation facilities, the country will also need to meet rigorous standards on service quality. For instance, to have safely managed water, a household must have access to a technologically improved water source that is on premise and delivers uninterrupted and clean water, free of chemical and bacterial contaminants. To meet the sanitation target, a household will need an unshared, improved sanitation facility that has regular fecal sludge management and is equipped with a handwashing station with available soap and water (JMP 2017).
However, Tanzania’s performance during the MDG period sets a difficult task for meeting the ambitious SDGs. Globally, Tanzania is among the 17 countries that could not meet the water xvi Reaching for the SDGs: The Untapped Potential of Tanzania’s Water Supply, Sanitation, and Hygiene Sector target and among the 69 that missed the sanitation target. Compared to its East African neighbors and the Sub-Saharan region, Tanzania had the smallest gains in improved water coverage during the MDG period and, despite making progress in sanitation, had the secondworst improved sanitation coverage (figures ES.1a and ES.1b). Tanzania is the second-largest economy in the East African Community (EAC) and has comparative advantages that could support strong economic growth: it is a resource-rich coastal hub and has good demographic dividends and political stability. Its shortcomings in the water and sanitation sector are somewhat surprising. Slow progress during the MDG era may make the SDG targets seem out of reach, but now the country has the opportunity to revise and revitalize efforts to ensure that all Tanzanians live in a safe WASH environment that bolsters their quality of life.
Message 2: Improved Water Services Are Largely Underdeveloped for Rural Dwellers and Unreliable for Too Many Urban Inhabitants
National improved water coverage is only 60 percent, meaning that some 21 million people lack access to a water source that is built with technology that prevents contaminants from entering the system. (See figure ES.2.) Rural areas have the worst improved water coverage—48 percent compared to 87 percent in urban areas. Many rural Tanzanians instead rely on traditional opendug wells (24 percent) or surface water (18 percent). In urban areas, people who cannot access tap or borehole water may turn instead to costly, informal tanker trucks or water vendors.
Furthermore, just 48 percent of the population has access to an improved water source that has a collection time of 30 minutes or less, and only about 25 percent have access to a water source on their household premises. Without proximal access to an improved source, many Tanzanians, particularly rural women, must travel long distances to retrieve water for drinking and other domestic needs, taking away valuable time from productive activities. On average, Tanzanians spend 36 minutes per trip to collect water. Assuming that water collection is a daily activity, with at least two trips per day, a household on average devotes more than eight hours per week to collecting water.
Though urban dwellers tend to have better access to improved water services close to their homes, they too face challenges of unreliable service, high dependence on informal providers, and low water quality. For instance, two-thirds of piped water users report an interruption in service at least once every two weeks. These problems stem from financial and service delivery problems at the urban utilities. For example, DAWASCO, Dar es Salaam’s utility, suffers from high rates of non-revenue water, consistently exceeding 50 percent over the past three years. Figures like these may reduce the utilities’ ability to invest in expanding and improving services for the sprawling urban population. In Dar es Salaam, 18 percent of the bottom 40 rely on informal tanker trucks.