Willingness to pay for water in secondary cities: do poverty and negative experiences matter?

ABSTRACT

This study explores poverty dimensions and negative experiences of households living in secondary cities of Kenya with the aim of understanding the determinants of the willingness to pay to access water services. Our findings suggest that negative experiences of households related to poor access to water, like water crises, water borne diseases, and daily time to fetch water, seem to play an important role. Conversely, poverty dimensions are not necessarily influential. More specifically, while daily income of the household is an important factor, other variables, namely, education, food shortages, and access to information do not have significant effects. Our evidence suggests that to raise the awareness of this public good’s value, local governments should focus on improving citizens’ information especially in poor areas, as well as the ability to pay.

KEYWORDS:

• Willingness to pay
• poverty
• water and sanitation
• negative experiences
• secondary cities
• Africa

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 A secondary city has a population of over 10,000 inhabitants (Cities Alliance 2019).

2 Cook, Kimuyu, and Whittington (2016) use an individual-level value of travel time estimate based on a stated preference experiment. The estimation includes capital costs for water storage, money paid either to water vendors or at sources that charge volumetrically, costs of treating water disease cases, and expenditures on drinking water treatment.

3 1 Kenyan shilling is equal to 0,0082 US Dollars.

4 One of the main causes of water crises in Kenya is related to environmental destabilisation, which has direct impact on both the water quality and availability of water resources (Ministry of Environment, Water and Natural Resources 2013).

5 Checking the correlation, we found that Fetch has low correlation with both Disease and Crisis (respectively, −0.3325 and −0.3105), whereas correlation between Crisis and Disease is −0.4258. These are all 5% significant. We then tested their possible interdependence in explaining WTP by including the three interactions in the full model. We found that only the one between Fetch and Crisis is significant. We then considered only the latter for the sake of parsimony and reported it as additional regressor to Model 2 (see Fetch*Crises in Model 3).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Giuseppe Tesoriere

Giuseppe Tesoriere, works World Resources Institute, as Senior Urban and Regional Economist. He leads and conducts economic research and analysis that help address key knowledge gaps and advance the objectives of WRI Ross Center project teams working globally across urban issues, including economic geography, inequality, and resilience. Prior to joining WRI, Giuseppe was senior urban economist at UN-HABITAT knowledge and innovation branch, and urban economy and finance branch. He also has several years' experience conducting data collection, and studies focussed on agglomeration economies, public goods and resilience working with World Bank and African Development Bank urban programs and projects in Africa, and collaborating with consulting companies in Middle-East and Italy. He held a PhD in economics

Raffaele Scuderi

Raffaele Scuderi, is full professor of Applied Economics at the Faculty of Economics and Law, Kore University of Enna (Italy), where he currently serves as the Dean of the Faculty. He is editor of Tourism Economics. His research areas include tourism and cultural economics, urban and regional economics, development economics. He holds a PhD in applied statistics.