How Effective are Water Connection Subsidies in Increasing Access to Clean Water for Low-Income Communities ?

Different actors can improve access to safe water in low-income communities in urban areas. Ghana’s urban population has more than tripled over the last three decades, outpacing the expansion of urban water infrastructure. In the Accra Metropolitan Area, fewer than 30 percent of households in low-income urban and peri-urban settlements have access to piped water services, revealing equity gaps. Some main challenges with supplying water to low-income urban and peri-urban settlements include inadequate policy and legislative frameworks and unaffordable lump sum connection fees.

USAID URBAN WASH is partnering with Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL) to understand, document, and disseminate lessons from the utility’s recent water connection subsidy projects implemented by its Low-Income Customer Support Department in Accra to address these equity and inclusion challenges. These lessons will be used to inform future iterations of Ghana Water Company Limited’s pro-poor programs, and potentially help other countries to learn from GWCL’s experience.

What characterizes a low-income urban community?

A low-income urban and peri-urban community could have the following characteristics:

• Permanent residence (formal or informal).
• An unplanned layout or loss of planned layout
• Poor physical access (especially vehicular access)
• Inadequate space for basic service (e.g., water) infrastructure
• A High housing occupancy
• A high proportion of renters, mostly in single rooms of compound houses occupied by multiple families
• The majority are low-income earners.

A low-income community in the Accra Metropolitan Area, Ghana.

Why does this matter?

Increasing the extent of household on-premise water connections would improve residents’ living conditions while boosting progress toward national and global development targets of universal access to safely managed water supply. To address barriers to piped water access in low-income households of urban and peri-urban settlements, connection subsidies reduce upfront costs for households, often pose a barrier to private water connection. This will, in turn, improve access to safe water in low-income communities.

Accra’s water service provider, Ghana Water Company Limited, began piloting water connection subsidies in 2017, adding more than 16,000 new subsidized connections through 2022. Learning from this research will elucidate lessons on subsidy implementation, targeting, administration, and financing.

Key knowledge gaps include the proportion of low-income residents who benefitted (directly or indirectly), the affordability of subsidized connection fees, the impact of land tenure requirements on water connections, the ability of targeting methods to reach the people with low-income and most vulnerable, and the barriers that specific population groups may face in benefitting from connection subsidy initiatives.

This brief was made possible by the support of the American People through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The content of this brief is the responsibility of Tetra Tech and The Aquaya Institute and does not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the United States Government.