Abstract
Public water services are still failing rural Tanzanians. Emboldened by advances in information communication technologies, the Ministry of Water has been developing computing, financial and administrative technologies to update and visualise the status of rural water points. This amalgam of technologies marks the emergence of an information infrastructure for rural water governance. The information infrastructure will enable the ministry to “see” the functionality status of all rural water points and to plan and budget for their repair and maintenance. In this paper, we examine three administrative technologies, which aim to standardise the functionality status of water points, and to prescribe how the information flows within the government hierarchy, and who is a legitimate recipient of this information. We analyze qualitative data, collected over a period of four years, in the framework of an interdisciplinary research program, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research—Science for Global Development (NWO-Wotro). In contrast to other researchers who study how information infrastructure evolves over time, we study what infrastructure evolution reveals about water governance. Our analysis of the practices of participants in rural water governance reveals tensions between formal and informal processes, which affect rural water services negatively.
Highlights
In Tanzania, an estimated 70% of 44 million citizens live in 12,617 villages [1]
We analyse three formal government processes relevant to the three administrative technologies Big Results Now (BRN), Central Data Management Team (CDMT) and SEMA discussed in the previous section
The first tension arose from efforts of the Ministry of Water (MoW) to standardise the functionality status of a geo-located water point (WP), during the period 2010–2017
Summary
In Tanzania, an estimated 70% of 44 million citizens live in 12,617 villages [1]. Public water services are still failing rural Tanzanians, despite decades of efforts to improve them [3,4,5,6,7]. A 2016 report of the Ministry of Water (MoW) shows that out of almost 88,000 rural water points 60% have “Functional”, 31% “Non Functional” and 8% “Functional Needs Repair” status. A water point was defined as the point at which water emerges from a public improved water supply, such as a water tap [9]. The MoW’s [10] definition is more precise: “a water point is a public tap or standpipe at which water emerges from a public
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