There is a quiet dissonance in the African water sector. Infrastructure is being built — sometimes at impressive scale — but the institutions tasked with operating and sustaining those assets remain, in many places, fragile, under-resourced, and caught between mandates that have outgrown their legal and organisational foundations. We know this intellectually. The JMP numbers confirm it: only a fraction of services on the continent qualify as safely managed, even where basic access has expanded. What we discuss less openly is why — and what it would take to change the trajectory.
This is the conversation we want to have in Kigali in August 2026, during the Professionalisation Dialogues of the Africa Water and Sanitation Systems Leadership Symposium.
I write this not as someone with all the answers, but as a practitioner who has spent the past several years at the frontline of exactly the kind of institutional transformation the symposium aims to address. At IRC Ghana, we have been supporting the Community Water and Sanitation Agency (CWSA) through its ambitious — and at times turbulent — journey to evolve from a facilitation agency into a rural water utility. That process, documented in a study we recently published with our partners, has taught us things that no policy paper alone could capture.
Ghana's rural water sector is in many ways a microcosm of the continent's wider dilemma. For decades, the Community Ownership and Management (COM) model served as the backbone of rural water service delivery. It delivered real gains in coverage — from 27% in 1990 to 62% by 2022. But over time, the model's limits became undeniable: volunteer-run management teams unable to maintain ageing infrastructure, revenue leakages fuelled by weak accountability, water quality testing that had all but ceased, and systems accumulating unpaid electricity debts they could never repay.
The response — transitioning CWSA into a utility service provider — was the right instinct. A revised national water policy, approved in 2024, endorses this direction. CWSA has since taken over direct management of some 200 small-town systems. But here is the uncomfortable truth we documented: the transition is happening de facto while the legal, regulatory, and financial architecture required to sustain it remains incomplete. The founding legislation has not been amended. Asset ownership is contested — between CWSA, local assemblies, and communities who contributed to construction costs. The regulatory body, PURC, has no mandate over rural service providers. And CWSA itself is inheriting the oldest, least functional, most indebted systems — precisely because the communities with well-performing assets decline to hand them over.
At the same time, a diverse ecosystem of private operators and social enterprises — Safe Water Network, 4Ward Development, and many others — has emerged, often outperforming the public utility on metrics like non-revenue water, billing collection, and water safety compliance. These operators innovate with solar pumping, prepaid metering, and cluster-based management. Yet they, too, operate in a regulatory vacuum, without licensing frameworks, codified technical standards, or a level playing field for tariff-setting.
While the ongoing institutional transformation of the Community Water and Sanitation Agency(CWSA) into a professionalised rural utility is a critical step, the current progress reveals an urgent need to broaden this reform beyond a single agency. Our recent study on formalising relationships between the CWSA, private operators, and Water Sanitation Management Teams (WSMTs) underscores a pivotal risk: without a sector-wide framework, we face deepening fragmentation and unregulated service delivery across the rural and small-town water space.
To avert this, the next phase of reform must transition from internal institutional change to a comprehensive governance model that treats all service providers as part of a single, professionalised industry. This sector-wide reform should encompass Standardised Performance Contracts by establishing uniform key performance indicators for all providers—whether they are CWSA-managed, private operators, or WSMTs—to ensure that service quality and reliability are guaranteed regardless of the management model. This should be complemented by Integrated Regulatory Oversight, achieved through an expanded mandate to regulate all rural service providers. This includes harmonising tariff-setting mechanisms and enforcing water quality standards; professionalised asset management by detailing equivalent asset-holding and maintenance responsibilities for all actors; formalised licensing and certification by implementing a mandatory licensing regime that requires private entities and WSMTs to meet specific technical and financial benchmarks.
This is not a story of failure. It is a story of a sector in the middle of a transformation that is more complex, more politically entangled, and more consequential than most anticipated.
As we have been preparing the Professionalisation track for Kigali with our Champion Group — which brings together leaders from WASAC Rwanda, NWSC Uganda, Ghana Water Limited, AfWASA, Uduma, Aguaconsult, IWA, Water for Good, VEI and IRC etc. — three broad pathways for professionalisation have emerged. I think they map neatly onto what we are seeing not only in Ghana, but across the continent.
The first is workforce competence: building, certifying, and retaining the skilled personnel that water and sanitation services require. In Ghana, we found that 80% of District Works Departments either lack water unit staff entirely or employ sub-professional officers rather than qualified engineers. You cannot professionalise service delivery when the human capital base is this thin. And the challenge is not unique to Ghana — evidence from Malawi, from East Africa, and even from the United States points to the same workforce sustainability crisis, compounded by ageing personnel and the absence of structured career pathways to attract young professionals.
The second is organisational work processes: the operational disciplines — asset management, financial planning, metering, maintenance scheduling, customer engagement — that distinguish a functioning utility from an agency managing systems by improvisation. CWSA's recent adoption of digital asset mapping, the mWater monitoring platform, and commercial service desks in the Western Region are encouraging steps. But they remain early, localised, and dependent on external partner support. Scaling these improvements requires regulatory incentives, performance benchmarks, and sustained investment.
The third pathway is formalisation: the structural shift from voluntary or informal service provision to contractual, regulated, remunerated arrangements. This is the most politically charged of the three, because it touches on questions of power, ownership, and institutional identity. In Ghana, the transition away from COM towards utility and private operator models has surfaced precisely these tensions — between central agencies and local governments, between public providers and private innovators, between communities who built their systems and institutions that want to manage them.
In Kigali, the Professionalisation track will convene three Transformation Dialogues, each designed to move beyond diagnosis and towards practical commitments. We will examine institutional performance and benchmarking — what does it actually take for a utility to turn around, and what role do regulators and peer networks play? We will discuss workforce development and human resource reform — not as an HR technicality, but as a strategic precondition for everything else. And we will tackle the professionalisation of rural operators and utilities — the space where the gap between ambition and institutional reality is widest, and where the lessons from countries like Ghana, Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, and Senegal can inform each other most productively.
We will also launch the Partnership for Professionalisation and Performance — a long-term African platform to coordinate efforts across utilities, governments, financiers, and technical partners. The intention is to create a mechanism that outlives the symposium itself, anchoring the professionalisation agenda in institutional commitments rather than project cycles.
These dialogues are not an academic exercise. The Champion Group preparing them includes people running utilities, regulating sectors, financing infrastructure, and supporting operators on the ground. The sessions will reflect that orientation.
If you are a utility leader navigating a performance improvement process, a regulator grappling with how to extend oversight to rural and private providers, a government official responsible for water policy reform, a development finance professional assessing the creditworthiness of water institutions, or a practitioner working at the interface of community systems and professional service delivery — this conversation is directly relevant to your work.
What Ghana's experience demonstrates — and what evidence from across the continent confirms — is that professionalisation is not a luxury to be pursued once other priorities are settled. It is the precondition for financial credibility, for investor confidence, for regulatory effectiveness, and ultimately for the safely managed services that SDG 6 demands.
The question is no longer whether to professionalise. It is how to do it at scale, in a structured way, and with the political and financial backing it requires. That is the conversation we are preparing for Kigali.
I hope you will join us.
The Africa Water and Sanitation Systems Leadership Symposium takes place from 17 to 21 August 2026 in Kigali, Rwanda, convened by AMCOW and hosted by the Government of Rwanda. For registration and further information, visit www.africawatersystems.org