December 2012: The Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) of the World Bank and the Kenya Water and Sanitation Services Improvement Project (WASSIP) are working jointly to strength social accountability in water services. The adopted strategy consists in establishing Water Action Groups, and using scorecards and information and communication technologies (ICT), allowing citizens to provide real time feedback.

The project is a response to the lack of significant community involvement in Kenya’s investment in water production, which affected the protection of consumer’s preferences and the delivery of adequate service standards. The role of the World Bank’s WSP is to help the Kenyan Water Services Regulatory Board (WASREB) to reach out to the citizens ensuring intermediaries channels of communication.

In order to better incorporate the view of citizens, quarterly focus groups and biannual public hearings are organized via The Water Action Groups, while the scorecards reports on service gaps, such as problems of corruption and bill errors.

The Kenya Water and Sanitation Services improvement Project has benefited from an initial US$150 million loan from the International Development Association (IDA), the World Bank’s Fund for the Poorest, before partnering with the WSP. In the first two years of the pilot project, 400 complaints were registered and 97% were resolved. According to the World Bank, these successful rates can be explained by bringing unresolved issues “up the chain-of-command.”

The initiative is being scaled-up and is promoting South-South knowledge exchange, since Kenya is now assisting Zambia on how to use citizen monitor tools. However, to continue expanding, new organizations incentives will have to be created to overcome the distrust of some utilities companies and better monitoring system will be needed to speed-up the analysis of citizens’ feedback. [World Bank Press Release]