Enabling Safe Rural Water Services in Kenya

Four out of five people in rural Sub-Saharan Africa do not have access to safe drinking water. The international community made high-level commitments to secure access to safe drinking water for all by 2030 (Sustainable Development Goal 6.1). This ambition reflects the importance of safely managed water services for disrupting disease transmission in communities. In low-income, rural settings water is often accessed through hand-pumps or small piped water systems. While access to taps and handpumps has improved for many rural communities over the last few decades, the quality of the water being provided by this infrastructure is often not managed. And for most households, treating water themselves is not a reasonable option because of the costs and time requirement.

Water treatment technologies that are designed for installation in decentralised water systems - either in the distribution system or at points of collection (community shared taps and handpumps) - can reduce the risk of diarrheal disease and improve public health outcomes. So far, research on supply-level rural water treatment has evaluated filtration and disinfection (chlorination, UVC radiation) methods, focusing on technological effectiveness. Beyond the technology development, however, there is a need for further research to understand how treatment interventions can be implemented broadly and sustainably. Particularly, key challenges related to supply chains, operation and maintenance, and financing must be addressed.

'Enabling Safe Rural Water Services in Kenya' is a solution-oriented research project that will bring together water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector stakeholders to develop a new approach for implementing supply-level treatment in rural water systems. This approach will focus on enabling sustainable operation and maintenance of water services. Implementation of the approach will begin in two counties in Kenya and will expand under the direction of the Kenyan Water Services Regulatory Board. The purpose of this work is to systemically and sustainably improve drinking water safety in rural community and school settings in Kenya. It will generate learnings that can be adapted and applied more broadly to help advance universal access to safe drinking water in rural areas through supply-level treatment.

This project takes an implementation science approach to the development of an institutional intervention that will increase access to safe drinking-water in rural Kenya. More specifically, a knowledge-to-action (K2A) process model supported by structurationist systems theory is used to guide engagement with government, funders, practitioners, researchers, and communities in an action research process. The K2A model is derived from planned action theory and is intended to structure deliberate efforts to work with stakeholders to intervene in systemic institutional dynamics. This approach is a departure from existing water treatment intervention approaches, which centre around particular technologies and predominantly use deterministic framings in an effort to predict or evaluate specific intervention outcomes. The objective is to develop an enabling environment that is not technology-specific, thereby allowing a modular approach to treatment services that is adaptable to community and environmental settings. This is a solution-oriented research project that will network water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector stakeholders to enable knowledge co-production.

Key outputs of the project will include a strengthened community of rural water treatment implementers linked via an online forum to facilitate ongoing knowledge exchange and collaboration; a practical guide for implementing rural water treatment using an approach that is modular and adaptable to varied local contexts; and a regulatory model outlining key changes in rules and resourcing needed to enable inclusion of water safety management in rural development. The project will also contribute to academic discourse by advancing literature on a) operation and maintenance challenges in rural WASH programming and b) development of institutional interventions using an action research learning history approach.