Dry future: Who pays for water when aid runs out in the north?

Peter Lam has lived in Kakuma refugee camp since 2011, when he arrived from South Sudan. Ten people share his household: his siblings, his elder sister and her four children. He can name the most the family could spend on water.

“I think it can’t go beyond 500 a month and that is just to maintain the little water that we have,” he said.

The ceiling holds only while the taps run. The family’s supply is supported by UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, and is mostly free. On another side of the settlement, he said, a jerrycan costs 50 shillings. For a household of 10, that adds up fast, in a place where not everyone has a job.

That free supply is now being questioned. The World Food Programme cut rations in the Kakuma and Kalobeyei area to 30 per cent of the minimum food basket in June 2025.

A World Bank report found that the median aid refugees receive has fallen 53 per cent in Kakuma and 23 per cent in Kalobeyei. Agencies now sort refugees by vulnerability, a system called differentiated assistance.

Water is the next service to be rethought. On September 24, Swisscontact, Plan International Kenya and UNHCR convened government officials, financiers and business owners at a tented camp in Lodwar for the Private Sector for WASH Forum.

The concept behind it argued that free or heavily subsidised provision can “crowd out local providers.” It proposed a 12-to-18-month transition in which donors route money through local distributors and retailers, so businesses build a customer base before aid recedes.

The question is whether a business can survive selling water in Turkana, and what happens to those who cannot pay.

Jimmy Delyon, Head of programmes at Swisscontact, said more than 80 per cent of water, sanitation and hygiene services in Turkana still depend on donor money. The institutions meant to take over are young, he said: “A lot of the institutions have been in existence for no more than five years.”

His evidence comes from toilets, not water. Swisscontact’s Climate Proofing WASH project helped a local company, Atoo Usafi, install 50 pay-for-use urine-diverting dry toilets. The project credits the wider effort with 266 jobs and four public-private partnerships.

“We de-risked the 50,” he said. The company then approached a lender to finance more units. “You have local actors like Atoo, and they are speaking to local Kenyan financiers.”

Businesses “cannot fill the gap of donor funding,” he said, but they can take over specific services, such as free water installation and free toilets, on a pay-for-use basis. After 10 months, “we’ve barely scratched the surface.” He could not say what water costs to produce. “I can’t give you a specific number on water.”

Mohammed Noor, a water engineer and a director at Atoo Usafi Kakuma, sells water at Sh5 per 20-litre jerrycan.

Trucks carry it to Lomeguro, a gold-mining area with no borehole, where it sells for Sh50. Transporters who buy from him and resell also charge 50, a tenfold markup he called justified by drought and transport costs.

Diesel is the trouble. A generator burns about 40 litres a day, at roughly Sh230 a litre. That is about Sh9,200 daily, against takings he put at Sh6,000 to 7,000. So he runs about 90 per cent on solar and switches to the generator when clouds come, or drought lowers the water table.

Drought hurt him this year. In May, one borehole died, and he estimated a 30 per cent loss. Three others draw on an aquifer he says has never run dry.

Asked who should absorb higher costs, he did not name a government or a donor. “There are some people that are very poor, so we just give them water.” That is charity, not a model, and it depends on one owner’s discretion.

Lominito Tomaru, Plan International’s project manager in Turkana, drew a line between two things. “The willingness to pay is there, but the challenge is now the ability to pay,” he said.

KALWASCO, the county-owned water company for Kakuma, Kalobeyei, Letea and Lopur, registered in 2024 and got a board in early 2025. It has begun segregating customers: metered connections for those who can pay, communal taps for those who cannot.

Tariffs vary by locality, village committees advise on what is affordable, and livestock keepers can pay in kind or spread one month’s payment over six. Tomoru said connections and payments are rising, though “we are not yet there in terms of a complete utilisation of pay-for-use services.”

Godfrey Akolong, director of the Kalobeyei Integrated Socio-economic Development Plan (KISEDP) at the Turkana County Government, said the county will regulate prices within the national framework. “Commercial sustainability should not come at the expense of access for low-income households.”

He listed what private operators may take on: production and distribution, operation and maintenance, metering, billing and faecal sludge management. The county keeps oversight, public investment and regulation. If an operator walks away, he said, “water is a public service,” and contracts and contingency plans will protect supply.

On households that cannot pay, Akolong said: “The transition cannot be purely commercial.” He pointed to affordable tariffs, targeted support and cross-subsidy “where feasible,” so that “no one is excluded because of inability to pay.”

He explained that. “The investment requirement is far beyond what the County can finance alone.”

The forum revealed that the county’s problem is more bluntly: limited revenue from utilities and a burden of maintaining stranded rural infrastructure.

His answers on drought echo what people in the settlements say. Boreholes are the main source, and drought concentrates people and livestock on fewer working points, especially when pumps break down. The county is prioritising solar, storage, water harvesting and repairs.

The gap between promise and mechanism shows in Noor’s numbers. A county tariff can cap what a utility charges. It is unclear what caps a truck that buys at sh5 and sells at 50 beyond the pipeline.

Lam sees another gap. Many people in his community do not know what is coming, he said. “A lot of people are not prepared; most of the people are not prepared in terms of awareness.” The last big change, differentiated assistance, hit people who were not ready. “No one was ready for that,” he said, and he described people in distress afterwards, some deciding to walk home to South Sudan.

UNHCR reported that more than 9,300 South Sudanese refugees left Kakuma and Kalobeyei between June and early September 2025. Lam said he went back once and returned.

He described what a dry tap does. During a shortage this year, he said, a friend’s family of seven or more had no water in the compound from morning to evening. They skipped meals. The children slept in the clothes they had played in.

He linked shortages to period poverty, and said some families split when men or women left to look for water or work. While surveying people with disabilities for United Disabled Persons of Kenya, he met a man who walks four kilometres for water, two hours each way. That water is only for cooking.

What Lam wants first is information, through training, workshops and community leaders. Otherwise, he said, “the integration is much more on paper than it is being implemented.”

Sharon Mosin, Swisscontact’s country director, opened the forum by asking what “remains when the project ends.” The evidence so far offers partial answers. A toilet company found a lender. A water seller keeps prices low and sometimes gives water away. A utility is learning to bill people whose incomes it has barely measured. The county has committed, in writing, that nobody will be shut out.

Nobody has yet shown what happens when a drought lifts costs and the customer cannot pay, or who funds the difference.

Lam put the test in his own terms. If communities are not prepared, he said, “Is that really going to be sustainable for them and also affordable?”