Water is essential for life yet is often unavailable to many in acceptable quantities and quality. In Tamale, Ghana, evidence from the Living Off-Grid Food and Infrastructure Collaboration reveals the realities of severe deprivation, precarity and struggles that households and communities routinely endure in pursuit of water contrary to official statistics that suggest over 90% of households have access to pipe water. Under these circumstances, multiple forms of benevolence and solidarity shape local people’s access to water.
Low investment and poor maintenance
The water problem in Tamale is symptomatic of the wider challenge of delivering services in the city; provision and distribution are often erratic, unreliable, and far below demand. The water supply architecture in Ghana mandates Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL) to supply water to Tamale residents. However, a combination of low investment, poor maintenance and revenue losses due to leakages and substantial unbilled water has hampered the ability of GWCL to keep pace with the increasing demand for water in Tamale. The last upgrade of the water system took place in 2008 with external support from the US Government channeled through Ghana’s Millennium Development Authority.
Credit: Issahaka Fuseini, Ibrahim Yakubu, Carlos Abdul-Latif Adam.
To distribute the limited water, the GWCL has introduced water rationing, however, this has not solved the problem because the gravity-based distribution barely reaches areas on higher ground in the southern, southeastern, eastern and northernmost parts of the city. In addition, the networked distribution infrastructure is limited in coverage, and so many neighbourhoods and communities stay off-grid.
Solutions are envisioned in the form of US$45.5 million support from the US Government to the Ghanaian Government to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal Six through improved water and sanitation delivery in Northern Ghana and the longer-term US$272 million water project on the White Volta River at Yapei, about 50km south of Tamale. Executed by Biwater (a UK-registered company) with funding from UK Export Finance and Deutsche Bank, the project is expected to triple the current water supply to the city. However, there is no clear timeline as to when the project will come on stream as little progress has been made since construction began in 2019.
Collaboration, benevolence, and solidarity for water in Tamale
While people hope for a future where the water expansion at Yapei will bring relief to Tamale, other actors have stepped in to provide alternative water access points in different parts of the city.
International development partners
The US$16 million ‘WASH in Disaster Prone Communities project’ led by UN-Habitat worked in collaboration with the Government of Ghana to provide access to flood-resilient water systems and infrastructure in 265 communities in Northern Ghana including in Tamale. The water points are managed by community-nominated caretakers who collect an agreed amount from users for maintenance and payment of service bills. Two of the facilities in Tamale’s Gumbihini community have since become dysfunctional due to unpaid electricity bills and equipment breakdown.
Residents blamed the accumulated debt on the free water policy of the Government of Ghana during the COVID-19 pandemic. Water bills increased by more than 100% immediately after the free water policy came to an end, but the operators of these community-managed water points could not adjust the rates upwards to keep them afloat. Payment of the old rates was also not forthcoming because people had become used to free water. The only facility which survived disconnection after the free water policy was managed by the local councillor for the area who frequently deployed his networks and connections to avoid disconnection.
Civil society
NGOs and civil society organisations also provide alternative water points or support the retrofitting of existing water points. The oldest public borehole in the centre of Tamale was mechanised and automated by WaterAid Ghana and New Energy. It is now one of the high-yielding water points which supply mainly tractor water tankers for distribution to households. Management of this facility is less complicated because managers do not engage households directly but through the tractor water tanker service providers. However, management of the facility is highly politicised and switches hands at every change of government.
Faith-based organisations
In recent times, religious bodies have also become major players in the provision of alternative water sources in Tamale. The vast majority of these come from the Middle East including Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, as well as a few from the UK and North America. The support from Muslim countries and Islamic organisations often comes in the form of aid for the construction of mosques and Islamic learning centres with ancillary facilities such as mechanised boreholes, although some organisations solely provide communal water access points independent of mosques and centres.
There are over 200 such boreholes dotted around Tamale. These alternative water sources fill the critical gaps left by the inadequate and unreliable urban water supply system and are the most viable option for many households. This has led to a 119 percentage points increase, between 2010 and 2021, in the proportion of households in Tamale that use boreholes as their main source of drinking water while access to piped water declined by 25 percentage points during the period.
Local community members
At the community level, individuals also exhibit acts of solidarity and benevolence by opening privately financed water access points to their neighbours and the public. Many of these individuals do not charge fees for this when they share with close neighbours. However, there are cases where individuals commercialised their high-yielding boreholes to take advantage of the high demand for water in the city.
In some areas of Tamale, politicians have drilled mechanised boreholes to serve their constituents. The Member of Parliament (MP) for Tamale Central, one of four MPs in Tamale, has drilled approximately 18 boreholes in the 18 wards of his constituency. Although not all of these facilities are high yielding, several have become important water access points serving huge populations.
Where the water table does not support the drilling of high-yielding boreholes, communities resort to dams and dugouts. Dams require ‘all-hands-on-deck’ to sustain them for a few months after the rainy season or till the next rains. Notable dams include Gbanyamni and Datoyili dams that serve two of the driest and most water-starved communities in Tamale. The Datoyili Dam is the main source of water for the Datoyili community and the surrounding area, which are least served by GWCL.
To manage this precious dam, a whole web of socio-engineering structures are in place. An effective traditional governance system regulates the competing uses for the water, providing guidelines for domestic use, livestock, and farming to sustain the water and delay the early drying up of the dam. A fine balance of improvised water pumping infrastructure and tricycle transportation has improved physical access to water from the dam while reducing the risk of contamination and turbidity.
Livelihoods and employment associated with the dam have created a sense of solidarity and care, as well as profit. For example, a flexible pricing policy has meant that operators of the pumping system charged the same price in 2023 as in 2022 despite fuel price increases and general hikes in the cost of living. Operators fill for free for women who go to fetch water at the dam and excess water from the filling point trickles down a channel for watering livestock and vegetable farms further downstream.
Recognition and support
It is clear that various forms of solidarity and benevolence in alternative water supply in Tamale are critical to residents’ access to water. Across all the alternative water supply sources, low-income households and poor/off-grid communities or neighbourhoods are the targets and beneficiaries of these multiple collaborative and solidarity processes of water service delivery. The processes and collaborations that underpin them need to be nurtured to both enable and sustain water access, as well as to promote wider contributions to poverty reduction, health and gender equity.
The horizontal and vertical partnerships across state and non-state actors, development partners, faith-based organisations and all those stakeholders who play a role in the city’s water delivery are crucial. Tamale’s governance processes must recognise and support the interventions of micro-level non-state actors that guarantee access to water as a stopgap measure to sustain lives while residents hope for long-term solutions by the government.
