In a training room in rural Rwanda earlier this year, a group of water operators sat working through a question that had little to do with pipes or pumps. They were calculating whether their small utilities — some serving as few as three hundred household connections — could ever be trusted by a bank. The operators run piped systems under five-year contracts with WASAC, Rwanda’s national water and sanitation authority. They read meters, collect payments, repair leaks. The infrastructure belongs to the state. Their contract horizon is too short for most lenders. They hold no collateral. By any banking standard, they are unbankable. And yet the trainers pressed the question: what does it take to become creditworthy — not in order to borrow, but in order to be worthy of trust? That distinction lies at the heart of a much larger conversation now gathering force across the continent. It is a conversation about why Africa’s water and sanitation systems remain chronically broken, and what it would take to fix them. Not with more aid. Not with more conferences. But with something harder: institutional credibility. The numbers behind the crisis The scale of the problem resists euphemism. According to the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme, 69 per cent of sub-Saharan Africans lacked safely managed drinking water in 2022. Eighty per cent lacked safely managed sanitation. At current rates of progress, the region would not reach the global safe water target until around 2056. For sanitation, the projected date stretches to 2170. These statistics translate into waterborne disease, stunted children, girls pulled from school to fetch water, and cities where taps run dry. The World Bank has estimated that water scarcity could cut the continent’s GDP by six per cent by mid-century. The GLAAS 2025 report — the most comprehensive global assessment of water and sanitation systems, launched in Dakar in January with data from 105 countries — confirmed what practitioners have long argued: the crisis is not principally about infrastructure. It is about the systems that govern, finance, and operate water services. Fewer than 20 per cent of countries have sufficient funding to meet national targets. Sixty per cent cannot spend the capital budgets they already have. Many countries in sub-Saharan Africa invest less than five dollars per person per year on water and sanitation. Only 24 per cent of countries globally have sufficient human resources for drinking-water regulation, and only 19 per cent for sanitation. Policies exist; the capacity to implement them does not. From Dakar to Kigali The African Union declared 2026 the Year of Water and endorsed a new continental water vision in February. In late January, over 2,000 water professionals gathered in Dakar for the preparatory meeting ahead of the UN Water Conference, scheduled for Abu Dhabi in December. The message was clear: 2026 is an action year, not an advocacy cycle. The sector’s credibility will be judged by delivery. Against this backdrop, the Africa Water and Sanitation Systems Leadership Symposium will convene in Kigali from August 17 to 21, hosted by the Government of Rwanda, convened by African Ministers' Council on Water (AMCOW), and facilitated by IRC Africa. Roughly 1,000 participants are expected: heads of state, ministers of water and finance, regulators, utility chief executives, development finance institutions, and young innovators. The symposium builds on a sequence its organisers describe as a movement. In 2022, the All Systems Go Africa gathering in Accra affirmed African-led systems change. In 2025, the Africa Water Investment Summit in Cape Town launched the reform and investment agenda under the AU’s Water Investment Programme. Kigali is designed as the moment commitments are converted into investable reform pathways — and as Africa’s defining contribution to Abu Dhabi. The credibility thesis At the intellectual centre of the symposium is a proposition that challenges decades of sector orthodoxy: the primary barrier to water investment in Africa is not insufficient funding. It is insufficient trust. Technologies exist. Policy tools are known. Financing instruments are available. Yet progress remains stubbornly slow because the institutions that should attract and manage capital are not yet seen as reliable enough to receive it. The AU’s High-Level Panel on Water Investments has mapped where the continent’s $30 billion annual financing need must come from. At the base of its investment pyramid sits sector governance — efficiency gains, responsible tariffs, and fiscal discipline — worth $11.5 billion a year. Next comes domestic resource mobilisation through institutional investors, national development banks, and government budgets: $17.5 billion. Only then come multilateral and climate funds, at just over $4 billion. At the very top, bilateral aid and philanthropy account for barely half a billion — less than two per cent of the total. The implication is stark: Africa’s water future will be financed primarily by Africans themselves. But only if their institutions inspire confidence. Without clear rules, competent regulators, and utilities that account for every dollar and every litre, money stays away — or arrives on terms so expensive that it deepens the debt burden. As the Nobel laureate Esther Duflo recently observed, what undermines African budgets is not the absence of grants but the cost of capital, driven by debt crises and external monetary policies that ignore their consequences in the global south. Where reform has already worked The argument is not theoretical. Benin elevated water to a national priority, overhauled public financial management, created an autonomous rural water agency, and restructured its urban utility. A landmark €500 million SDG-linked Eurobond followed, alongside major concessional financing. Rural drinking water coverage jumped from 54 per cent in 2019 to nearly 80 per cent by end-2023. Reform built credibility; credibility unlocked finance; finance delivered services. In Uganda, the National Water and Sewerage Corporation has been professionalising steadily since 1995 under consistent political and technical leadership. Internal performance contracts, digital billing, decentralised services, and transparent management transformed the institution over decades. By 2024, its asset base had grown sixfold, its network had expanded from 8,000 to over 19,000 kilometres, and it could access commercial loans and plan bond issuances on its own terms. In both cases, reform came first. Finance followed. Rwanda, the symposium’s host, offers a different but equally instructive trajectory: sustained presidential leadership translated national vision into institutional coherence across public administration, infrastructure, and sanitation — demonstrating that when authority, accountability, and delivery are aligned, transformation becomes operational, not merely aspirational. Ghana’s ongoing Rural Water Utilitisation Project is testing yet another pathway, cautiously professionalising community-managed water systems into a public utility model while navigating the legal and regulatory ambiguities such transitions inevitably involve. Both will feature prominently at the symposium. Four pillars, one framework Kigali is structured around four pillars that form the Framework for Financial Credibility. Leadership: the exercise of formal authority by those who can decide, allocate, and enforce. Regulation and accountability: predictable tariff regimes, performance standards, and transparent oversight. Professionalisation: competent personnel, reliable data, and modern asset management across all sector institutions. Strategic public finance: the integration of water into national fiscal frameworks through responsible tariffs, predictable budgets, and blended domestic and international finance. Six content streams will operationalise these across the symposium’s working days: high-level political dialogues bringing together heads of state with ministers of finance, strategic sessions on regulation, professionalisation, and public finance, dedicated youth and innovation programming, and an investment marketplace connecting reform initiatives with development finance institutions and impact investors. Each stream is designed so that every conversation contributes directly to building financial credibility and unlocking investment. The symposium aims to produce a Kigali Declaration on Systems Transformation, an Institutional Empowerment Platform to help countries structure reform-driven investment pipelines, and Country Reform Partnerships to sustain momentum after the delegates leave. Progress will be tracked through AMCOW’s Executive Committee in October and the AU’s end-of-year water report. Together, these will form Africa’s collective contribution to the UN Water Conference in December. A different signal Back in that Rwandan training room, the operators reached a conclusion that surprised some of them. Creditworthiness was not primarily about the bank. It was about themselves — knowing their costs, managing their revenues, maintaining their infrastructure, planning ahead. Building trust with customers, regulators, and the public institutions that own the assets they operate. The bank, if it ever came, would come last. That insight — unglamorous, ground-level, stubbornly practical — captures the logic that Kigali 2026 seeks to scale across a continent. The era of asking the world for more aid is over. What Africa needs now is to send a different signal: one grounded in institutional strength, fiscal discipline, and the professional excellence that makes systems worth investing in. For public authorities across East and Central Africa who are serious about transforming their water and sanitation systems, Kigali offers a seat at the table. The destination is no longer ambition. It is delivery. The author is Director of IRC Africa and Lead Facilitator for the Africa Water and Sanitation Systems Leadership Symposium 2026. He writes in a personal capacity.
