Every urban water manager in Africa knows the number—and knows how difficult it is to bring it down. Drawing on World Bank data, roughly 35% of the water that utilities produce worldwide is never billed. It is captured, treated, pumped and pressurised, yet generates no revenue. Some of it leaks from ageing pipes; the rest disappears into illegal connections, faulty meters and broken billing systems. Many African utilities lose more, often around 40%, and the weakest urban systems lose closer to half: in those systems, one litre in every two is never paid for.
Most people read this as an engineering problem. It is not, and showing why is one of the aims of the Africa Water & Sanitation Systems Leadership Symposium in Kigali.
Start with the countries we rarely think to question. France's national water observatory reports that its distribution networks operate at about 80% efficiency, which means close to 20% of the water entering the supply system does not result in recorded consumption. That is nearly a billion cubic metres lost every year, the annual consumption of some 18.5 million people. The United States loses over two trillion gallons of treated water annually, at a cost estimated by industry bodies at nearly $6.4 billion. These are among the wealthiest, best-financed water sectors in the world.
The Netherlands, by contrast, keeps leakage at around 5–6%, among the lowest anywhere, after decades of disciplined maintenance and sustained investment. The difference between the Netherlands and everyone else is largely institutional and managerial, not simply geographic or economic. Non-revenue water reflects how a system is governed, not where it sits on a map.
Africa's best utilities can meet global benchmarks; the World Bank's assessment of the continent's utilities found that the top performers reach world-class operational and financial standards. The trouble is that performance varies enormously between and within countries, because water is a local service and local governance decides the outcome.
The point is made most powerfully by Burkina Faso. ONEA, the state-owned utility of one of the world's lowest-income countries, held its non-revenue water below 20% for years: around 16% in 2008 and about 18% by 2016 (World Bank data). That discipline restored its financial equilibrium and helped mobilise international finance. Losses have since risen again, a reminder that efficiency is sustained through constant effort and cannot be achieved once and for all. ONEA became a continental reference not because Burkina was rich but because the utility was well run. Wealth does not guarantee performance; governance does.
At the other end of the range, losses run much higher, and they track the pressures a system is under. In Ghana, the utilities regulator (PURC) reports non-revenue water of 45.5% for the national operator, which is grappling with ageing networks. In Addis Ababa, a 2023 water-balance analysis of the utility's own data put losses at nearly 42%, with a high Infrastructure Leakage Index pointing to substantial leakage in a network growing faster than it can be renewed. This is one reason the utility has turned to a performance-based contract to reduce losses. Neither case reflects indifference; both illustrate the impact of structural strain on a network.
Even well-run utilities show how hard this is. In Uganda, a national operator widely respected for its management still loses around 34%, and its 2025–2030 plan charts a careful path to 28% by 2030. The point is that bringing losses down is a decade-long undertaking even for disciplined, well-governed systems. That is a measure of how structural the challenge has become.
That also means we should be careful about the target itself. A single percentage is a poor benchmark, as the international water community has argued for more than two decades. Networks with the same physical leakage can report very different loss percentages: a network serving low-consumption households will appear far less efficient than a high-consumption one. As a result, a universal target such as a 25% cap unfairly penalises the very systems already under the most strain. Serious regulators do not manage performance on the headline figure alone. They separate physical losses from commercial ones. Physical losses are the leaks, measured through litres per connection per day and the Infrastructure Leakage Index; commercial losses come from faulty metering, billing failures and theft. Percentages are useful for communication, but performance standards must be diagnostic. France puts this principle into practice: its regulator sets each utility a tailored efficiency threshold and penalises those that fall below it without a corrective action plan.
Read this way, non-revenue water is more than a KPI; it is a proxy for financial credibility, the trust that lets a utility borrow, attract investment and fund its own renewal. A utility that loses 40% of its output is not only losing water; it is signalling lenders and finance ministries that its system may not be operating efficiently. Left unchecked, this becomes a vicious cycle: low credibility starves investment, poor investment degrades performance, and weak performance reinforces low credibility. A utility that controls its losses sends the opposite signal, and that signal can create value far beyond the water it saves. A colleague put this point to me recently as a question: across how many other essential services would we accept, and plan around, losing a quarter of what we produce without being able to say precisely where it goes?
No short-term fix will close Africa's roughly $30-billion-a-year investment gap, or the underlying credibility gap that sustains it. Only systemic reform can close both, by tackling challenges that technology and capacity alone cannot. That is precisely why non-revenue water is not a side issue at the Symposium in Kigali. It is a practical test of the Symposium’s entire systems-transformation agenda.
Non-revenue water belongs to all four. It is a leadership issue because reducing losses must be treated as a political and institutional priority. It is also a matter of professionalisation, requiring sound asset management, reliable data and sustained operational discipline, as well as effective regulation built on performance benchmarking and accountability. Above all, it is a strategic public-finance issue. The Dialogues will examine how tariff reform can strengthen domestic resource mobilisation, while finance ministers assess the investment readiness of national water systems through the African Union–AIP scorecard. It belongs, finally, on the floor of the Systems Reform and Investment Marketplace, where bankable reform proposals meet those who finance them. The Symposium's larger message is the one non-revenue water illustrates: a move from piecemeal technology and capacity projects to credible, self-sustaining national systems
So my appeal is direct, and it is to you: the directors general and senior managers of the continent's water companies.
You understand the operational realities and many of the technical answers better than anyone. But some of the most decisive conditions for success are not entirely in your hands: a sustainable tariff, real management autonomy, a credible regulator, access to long-term capital. Those levers sit with ministers, regulators and financiers, and the Symposium in Kigali gathers them in one place, for one week.
So do not come to present another leak-detection case study. Come with a broader message: non-revenue water performance is not only an operational metric but also evidence of financial credibility. Make that case to finance ministers and development banks. Bring your investment-ready projects to the Marketplace. Speak in the Dialogues, plainly, about which reforms to pricing, autonomy and regulation actually determine your results. The platform in Kigali is not one more technical conference; it is the rare chance to turn operators' expertise into political and financial commitment.
Non-revenue water will not be reduced by patching pipes alone. It will be reduced in the rooms where tariffs, mandates and budgets are decided. From 17 to 21 August, those rooms will be in Kigali.
Take your place at the table.