USAID Water and Development Technical Series: Urban Water Services

Cities play a key role in building a better future in an increasingly urbanized world. Improved urban services, such as reliable domestic water services, contribute to improved economic growth, health, and cleaner environments.

This brief was originally published on Globalwaters.

Introduction

Cities play a key role in building a better future in an increasingly urbanized world. Improved urban services, such as reliable domestic water services, contribute to improved economic growth, health, and cleaner environments. The purpose of this technical brief is to provide guidance on factors to consider in the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID’s) urban water programming.

The Urban Water Service Challenge

The global urban population is rapidly expanding, especially in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.1 As of 2018, an estimated 4 billion people, or 55 percent of the global population, lived in urban areas. Currently, 60 million new residents move to urban areas every year. Much of this growth is happening through expansion of metropolitan areas and secondary cities, especially in unplanned, informal settlements that lack basic services. Although precise numbers are difficult to determine,2 it is estimated that more than one in four urban residents live in informal settlements, amounting to over 1 billion people with inadequate housing, limited access to basic services and usually lacking land tenure security.3 Rapidly growing small towns are also creating a new set of challenges in service delivery.

 While global statistics show that urban populations are far more likely to have sewer connections and piped water supplies,5 these figures mask significant disparities between rich and poor populations. And, while rural access to drinking water has improved steadily since 1990, urban access has stagnated or improved only marginally,6 even falling in some places. In sub-Saharan Africa, while access to piped water in urban areas increased in absolute numbers, the percent of the urban population served with piped water on premises declined from 40 percent to 33 percent.8 In a dramatic example, in Nigeria access to piped water in urban areas declined from 32 percent in 1990 to 7 percent in 2015.9 These access figures also hide issues of service quality, such as poor reliability and intermittent supply, which have consequences for the quality of drinking water and ability of households to obtain sufficient supply.10 The pressures created by climate variability, aging infrastructure and increasing demand from a burgeoning urban population are putting even more strain on urban water services.