Why Water Utilities Fail in Africa: Behavioural Economics and Knowledge Management Explained

Water utilities in Africa are often evaluated through infrastructure capacity, funding levels, and engineering performance. However,such as assessment misses a deeper reality in that water systems fail largely due to behavioural economics and knowledge management breakdowns.

In my opinion, the reasons why African water utilities fail consistently shows that the problem is not only technical as it is also behavioural and institutional. Behaviour is the hidden driver of water system performance as there are limitations to what other input variables can achieve in the absence of behavioral management or transformation.

In many public utilities, assumptions are made that customers will pay water bills consistently, employees will follow formal processes, and that systems will operate predictably. However, from my experience real-world water management outcomes show otherwise.

Customer behaviour is shaped by trust in billing systems and the perceived accurateness and fairness of the billing system. The water utility service reliability is another factor that forms customer’s perceptions and consequent behavior towards the billing system. If and when trust declines there is a corresponding decrease in compliance. The customer compliance to the billing system drops parallel to the perceived reliability of the billing system, and this occurs even when infrastructure is available.

A major issue in public sector water management is weak knowledge transfer and this occurs when operational knowledge remains undocumented and staff turnover leads to knowledge loss. Operational competency is compromised as a result of weak knowledge transfer combined with knowledge loss in the utility. An entity that does not identify, store, and transfer its knowledge resource will most likely regress and at best will remain static.

Another shortfall in the behavioral economics and knowledge management relationship is the detriment caused by departments operating in silos, and at times even competing for scarce resources. Such behavior weakens the water utility performance and creates recurring system failures. A distinct observation of a non-evolving entity is the presence of recurring system failures.

As water is a critical daily commodity, scarcity and urgency challenges directly affect cognition and planning. Under pressure to normalize supply there is a preponderance of short-term decision making and reactive management. An increase in reactive management and short-term decision management adversely affects and weakens long-term planning, and this is a classic behavioural economics effect linked to water scarcity.

Water utilities do not fail only because of infrastructure gaps, they fail because of behavioural and knowledge system failures.

This article is part of a broader series on behavioural economics and knowledge management in African resource systems.

Dr. Kefentse Mzwinila

WaterManagement

WaterSecurity

BehaviouralEconomics

PublicPolicy

AfricaDevelopment

KnowledgeManagement

Infrastructure