Cyrus Njiru

A decade ago the ‘Dublin Principles’ shifted global thinking towards treating water as an economic good. The concern was that overly supply-driven approaches had been financially unsustainable, and therefore failed to reduce the service gap. Accompanying this conceptual shift has been a wider move towards focusing on the customer's needs and preferences and their willingness to pay, and applying marketing techniques to meet those needs in a financially sustainable manner. Although regarded as a positive move, its success is heavily dependent on how well water utilities understand their customers. This paper examines existing literature on the determinants of customer willingness to use and pay for improved water services in developing countries. The contribution of past research to our understanding of the behaviour of customers, with regard to service level choice and payment for services, is critically analysed. Basing on this analysis, we develop and discuss a generic model of a water consumer's decision-making process. The model serves two purposes. First, it consolidates past research into a coherent framework to facilitate implementation of the marketing approach. Secondly, we use the model to identify critical customer information that water utility managers need to know in order to be customer-focused.

Providing a sustainable and improved water service to the increasing urban population across the developing world remains one of the biggest challenges towards meeting the water target set out in the millennium development goals. Increasingly, the application of marketing principles to water services is being promoted as an essential requirement for providing a sustainable water service. In this study, the theory of reasoned action was employed in examining the factors that underpin the behaviour of the urban poor towards paying for improved water services. The findings show that both perceived social pressure and household's attitude have similar importance in predicting and explaining households' intention to pay for improved water services. Concern for a more comfortable life was the most important predictor of households' attitude, while “the family” was the most important referent group. The major determinants of households' intention to pay for improved water services were the reliability of the service and the time of supply. The study showed that there is scope for marketing improved water services using a social marketing approach. However, focusing on hygiene-related benefits is unlikely to have a significant influence on the urban poor's intention to pay for improved water services.

Sustainable development cannot be realised when a large proportion of people do not have access to improved water services. Indeed, despite concerted international effort and publicity made in the last two decades to increase coverage of improved water and sanitation services, the number of people without improved water and sanitation services continues to increase. Water utilities are not serving a large proportion of the urban population and small water enterprises (SWEs) have moved to fill the gap. This paper looks at the growing urban water problem and outlines the role played by SWEs in providing water services to those un-served or under-served by water utilities. Typical constraints faced by SWEs are outlined and the rationale for developing utility–SWE partnerships for the benefit of water consumers (customers) is provided. Potential opportunities for developing utility-SWE partnerships are discussed. The paper argues that utility-SWE partnerships can enable SWEs to provide affordable good quality water services to customers, while providing benefit to the utility and thus also assisting the utility to meet its mandate. The paper proposes win–win utility-SWEs partnerships aimed at achieving the objectives of utilities and SWEs while improving water services to customers in informal urban settlements of developing countries, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa.