Technical Report: How Can Madagascar Ensure Sustainable Access to Clean Water?

Madagascar’s Grand Sud region faces a challenge: ensuring sustainable access to clean and reliable water for its rural communities. The USAID Water Assessment Buy-In is paving the way for actionable solutions to enhance water security in the Grand Sud region. The World Bank is investing US $16 million through 20261 in village-level water supply infrastructure rehabilitation across the area of interest in the Grand Sud. The project focuses on upgrading and rehabilitating existing manual pump-equipped boreholes and converting them to solar power. While this upgrade promises increased reliability, it also brings challenges, such as the need for more substantial institutional support and effective service management.

This Southern Madagascar Water Assessment report provides actionable insights and recommendations for improving water management and sustainability in the Grand Sud region of Madagascar. It was developed under the USAID REAL-Water project to guide water programming efforts in collaboration with various stakeholders, including government entities and private operators.

A water pricing map across Anosy and Androy regions, showing prices for water cans (20L) based on February 2024 closed-survey questionnaires. It highlights administrative boundaries, regional and district borders, and price levels indicated by different-sized blue circles.

Highlights from the Report

• Widespread water infrastructure upgrades: By 2026, at least 776 World Bank-financed boreholes will be upgraded from manual to solar-powered systems. This will increase the complexity of the water supply systems (increasing maintenance and repair requirements) and is anticipated to be accompanied by a shift from existing informal and community water management to formal private operator management.

• Chronic lack of local institutional capacity: Commune-level and Regional Directorate of Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (DREAH) institutions are under-resourced and lack the capacity to effectively support, oversee, and regulate service providers. This lack of capacity increases the likelihood that recently rehabilitated systems will underperform and/or fail.

• Financial Sustainability: Our own financial analysis suggests that the water tariffs recommended by MEAH (100 MGA / 20L) will make significant cost recovery impossible in rural settings. We estimate that solar-powered systems will face financial shortfalls of roughly $2,500 per year each, on average.

• Poor private operator service delivery: Existing service providers struggle financially to operate across the Grand Sud due to low revenues and high costs of working in remote areas.

• A lack of community engagement: Communities that have benefited from upgraded infrastructure express frustration with the lack of communication regarding water pricing policies and other essential information related to introducing new management systems.

_{DISCLAIMER: This report is made possible by the support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The contents of this brief are the sole responsibility of The Aquaya Institute and REAL-Water consortium members. They do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the United States Government.}