siwi (iPosterSessions - an aMuze! Interactive system)

1. Background

An estimated 70% of 44 million Tanzanians live in over 12000 villages.
Population increases by 1.2 million people annually, one of the fastest growth rates in the world. However, water services are still failing rural dwellers, despite decades of efforts to improve them.

Out of a total number of about 88,000 rural water points, 60% water points have ‘Functional’, 31% ‘Non Functional’ and 8 % ‘Functional Needs Repair’ status. The figure illustrates how water points with a different functionality status appear to a nearby observer.

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2. Digital mapping

Advances in information and communication technologies (ICTs) opened up
new prospects for information collection and disclosure in water governance, also for the Ministry of Water in Tanzania.

The Ministry developed a digital Water Point Mapping System, which
encompasses a database of baseline data on the location and status of all rural water points (Functional, Non Functional, Functional Needs Repair), a mechanism for the regular updating of functionality status and visualisation software. The ambition was to “see” from distant Dar es Salaam the status of all rural water points in the nation, to plan and budget for their maintenance and improve the equity of future investments.

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3. Results

When the baseline data was released to public scrutiny in 2013, it was clear that the data quality was far worse than the Government of Tanzania and donors had expected. The water point data of entire wards within a district had either not been captured at all, or had a status of dubious quality. Between 2010 and 2017, researchers, development partners and the government used three different ICT-based standardisation processes for the regular updating of water point (WP) functionality.

Katomero, J., Georgiadou, Y., Lungo, J. and R. Hoppe (2017) Tensions in Rural Water Governance: The Elusive Functioning of Rural Water Points in Tanzania, ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2017, 6(9), 266; doi:10.3390/ijgi6090266. Available at http://www.mdpi.com/2220-9964/6/9/266/htm

Verplanke and Georgiadou (2017) Wicked Water Points : The Quest for an Error Free National Water Point Database. In: ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information : open access, 6 (2017) 244, 18 p. Available at: http://www.mdpi.com/2220-9964/6/8/244

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4. Tensions

The efforts to formalize and standardize water point functionality with
ICTs revealed tensions in rural water governance. Digitized standardisation competed with the informal practices that district water engineers and villagers use to assign a status to water points. The "vertical" communications between district water engineers and the Ministry side-lined the complexity of the "horizontal" communications the districts sustain in order to perform their daily work.

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5. Conclusions

Formal (vertical) and informal (horizontal) practices compete instead
of converging with each other. To discourage competion and encourage convergence, each level (ministry, district or village level) should have a degree of autonomy and flexibility in defining their own data standards, while conforming to standards of the higher levels. Given the political nature of the standardization process, it is important to negotiate, and provide appropriate incentives to each member to engage in the process of standard setting and use. The "flexible standards" approach--pioneered by the University of Oslo for public health information systems--which "works with the grain" of practices at different government levels, may release tensions between the national standardization, required by the Ministry and development partners, and sub-national informal practices.

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