Consumers International and Water and Sanitation Program

The consumer movement, according to this document, is growing rapidly in Africa as a civil society movement holding governments and the private sector accountable. This report from Consumers International and the Water and Sanitation Program analyses the participatory training and advocacy work of four African consumer organisations involved in developing sustainable water and sanitation policies that favour economically poor people.

The objectives of the training described are to improve the knowledge, skills, and access to information of consumer organisations so that they can become credible stakeholders in the water and sanitation sector reform, by understanding and addressing:

• complicated tariff and subsidy systems, which the organisations claim benefit consumers who can afford to connect to water networks;
• erratic services;
• ineffective regulatory frameworks and complaints mechanisms; and
• lack of government openness and willingness to work with civil society.

The report focuses on how consumers can influence policymakers to determine transparent and sustainable water and sanitation service policies, insuring that consumers, particularly the marginalised ones, have affordable access to these services. In order for consumer organisations to represent and advocate for the needs of the economically poor, whether within publicly owned water systems or public-private partnerships, it is, according to the document, important that consumer organisations:

• are not seen just as critics, but as organisations able to provide constructive alternatives
• receive training in tariff setting, regulation, institutional and legislative framework of water management, advocacy and communication
• develop the capacity to process complaints from individual consumers and use them to develop advocacy positions
• remain aware that accepting positions in regulatory bodies can make it harder to represent consumers: confidentiality rules may prevent issues from being publicly discussed
• recognise the long-term undesirability of themselves becoming service providers
• make donors understand that advocacy and capacity building take time.

Using case studies of the Bank Netherlands Water Partnership projects in Chad, Kenya, Senegal and Zambia, the report describes the elements and order of project implementation as the following: assist consumer organisations to facilitate country reviews; convene national stakeholder meetings; train and build capacity to communicate effectively on issues; implement advocacy and information campaigns; and provide training for consumer awareness education on understanding local water laws, tariffs and regulations. This includes learning how to draft recommendations to the government and developing strategies to communicate consumer issues, as well as organise protests and lobbying.

Id21UrbanNews March 29 2006.