Trust in Providers of Domestic Water: A Comparison of the Public Utility and Informal Vendors in Dar Es Salaam

Abstract

This article examines factors associated with trust in the public water utility and informal water vendors in the city of Dar es Salaam. We model trust in terms of citizens’ perceptions of what water providers deliver, how well the service fits with their lifestyle and values, the ease with which they can contact and influence the provider, and how well the government handles water issues. Our data come from a survey of the adult population of the four main residential districts of Dar es Salaam, conducted in March 2018. We find that trust in water providers is built on different foundations for the public utility and informal vendors. For the public utility, trust depends mainly on habituation to the service, knowledge of the vernacular and evaluations of government performance. For informal vendors, trust depends mainly on habituation to the service and capacity for engagement with social issues. Our study illustrates the how trust in service providers is an outcome of social accountability at the micro-level.

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the Scottish Funding Council (Grant No. SFC/AN/12/2017) and also the support and encouragement of our colleagues, Dr Nai Rui Chng, Professor Marian Scott, Dr Claire Miller, Professor William Sloan, Dr Stephanie Connelly and Dr Marta Vignola, as well as project partners Ing. Herbert Kashililah, Chair, Shahidi wa Maji (SwM), Morogoro, Tanzania, and Dr Nick Hepworth, Director, Water Witness International (WWI), Edinburgh.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Dar Es Salaam Water and Sewerage Authority (DAWASA) is now both the owner of the assets and the operator of the service. However, at the time of our fieldwork, the operation of services was entrusted to a separate publicly owned company, DAWASCO.

2. These figures are disputed. DAWASA states that it produces 510 million litres/day, but the Energy and Water Utilities Regulating Authority (EWURA) gave a figure of 357 million litres/day in 2018 (Smiley, 2019, p. 969).

3. The supplementary material may be found using DOI https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.13227755.v1. The survey also covered the urban area of Morogoro, a town around 200 kilometres west of Dar, but for the purposes of this article, the data from Morogoro are excluded.

4. We allow for clustering by ward rather than by district because it is at ward level that the variation in water infrastructure provision occurs. All districts have a mix of poorly and well-provided wards.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Scottish Funding Council [SFC/AN/12/2017].