WASH master plans have asked districts to do more than they could structurally deliver.
Published on: 19/03/2026
I have spent much of my professional life supporting local governments in West Africa to govern water better. Since 2016, I have been personally involved in developing SDG6 Master Plans for more than 100 districts across Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger — detailed planning instruments intended to help local authorities chart realistic pathways towards universal access to safely managed water and sanitation services.
I believe that work had value. I still do.
But I have been thinking hard about a question I failed to ask with sufficient rigour at the outset: given the institutional architecture these districts actually operate within, what can they realistically be expected to do — and what can they not?
I remember that early in this journey, between 2016 and 2017, my colleague and friend Patrick Moriarty asked me about the status of fiscal decentralisation in the communes whose master plans we were helping to develop. I think I replied that it was still work in progress. That was true, but it was also a way of not confronting what the data already made clear: the gap between what these communes were being asked to deliver and what their fiscal architecture enabled them to deliver was not a gap that better planning could close.
This blog is my honest answer to Patrick's question. It is not a criticism of the local authorities we have worked with. It is an attempt to name something we have been collectively slow to acknowledge: that a significant part of why progress stagnates is not about what districts lack in knowledge or tools. It stems from what systems around them withhold in fiscal authority, financial resources, and regulatory power.
A note on terminology: I use "local governments" here as shorthand for districts, communes and district assemblies, recognising that their legal mandates differ across countries.
The OECD/UCLG World Observatory on Subnational Government Finance and Investment provides the most comprehensive comparative dataset on local government finance globally. What this reveals about the countries I know best is sobering.
Ghana is frequently cited as having one of West Africa's more advanced decentralisation frameworks. Yet in 2020, the country's 260-odd district assemblies collectively generated revenues equivalent to just 0.6% of GDP. Central government grants account for over 82% of their income. Locally collected taxes represent less than 4% of district revenues.
Burkina Faso tells a similar story. The country has formally transferred eleven blocks of competence to its 351 communes, including water supply and sanitation since 2009. In practice, the average per capita revenue across all local and regional authorities is around USD 38 PPP (purchasing power parity) annually — and rural communes remain far below that. A large share goes to staff costs and administration, not to water infrastructure.
Mali exhibits an even sharper constraint. Grants and subsidies represent 86% of local authority revenues — and of the main local finance fund (FNACT), nearly 97% comes not from the national budget but from external donors. The national budget's contribution to FNACT was barely 3%. Local authority finance in Mali is, in practice, almost entirely dependent on aid.
Niger registers the most extreme figures. Total commune spending amounted to an estimated 0.3% of GDP — barely USD 5 PPP per capita. In a country where the water access deficit is among the continent's most severe, local governments are operating with resources that preclude any serious autonomous action on service delivery.
These are not aberrations. They are the system. Across low-income Sub-Saharan Africa, subnational public investment accounts for less than 20% of total public investment — compared to over 50% in OECD countries — and subnational expenditures often fall below 1% of GDP.
What this means for the water sector is that local governments in these contexts lack the resources to co-finance capital investment, maintain infrastructure, retain qualified technical staff, or exercise meaningful discretion over sector priorities.
When I facilitated the development of SDG6 Master Plans for districts in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, the exercise had genuine value: it structured thinking, revealed service gaps, generated local data, and created a document that could orient dialogue with central government or external partners. In at least seven communes in Burkina Faso, strategic plans made it possible to secure several million euros in development aid over the past decade to expand access and improve service quality. That is real. I do not regret the work.
But seven communes out of roughly a hundred tell their own story. And more critically, even where plans attracted resources, we did not truly address the structural constraints on the communes' capacity for action — nor the central systems that control the mobilisation and allocation of public resources. What we achieved, in those cases, was project-level relief within a system whose architecture remained unchanged.
I was implicitly asking these districts to do more than they could structurally deliver. The logic runs through much of the sector: local governments are responsible for water governance; services are not performing well; therefore we need to build the capacity of local governments to govern water better. The conclusion feels self-evident. But in many of the contexts I worked in, planning capacity was not the decisive bottleneck once minimum planning competence existed. Financing to implement the plan was. The regulatory authority to enforce standards was vested elsewhere. The tariff structure was set by others.
Good planning does not fix the absence of money. Good coordination does not substitute for the absence of regulatory power.
None of this means local governance quality is irrelevant. Leadership, integrity, technical discipline and local political commitment still matter — and I have seen them make a difference. But in many of the contexts I know, these factors operate within ceilings set elsewhere. The problem is not that local capacity does not matter; it is that it has too often been treated as the primary constraint when it was only one layer of a more structural problem.
The dominant response has been capacity development: training, toolkits, diagnostic frameworks, planning methodologies, sustainability checklists. These investments are rarely harmful in isolation. The problem is what they are implicitly asked to achieve.
A commune that lacks the resources to hire a qualified water technician does not become more capable by receiving training in asset management. A district whose investment plan depends on central transfers that arrive six months late does not plan better through an improved template. A local authority with no power over tariffs cannot drive financial sustainability through a better monitoring dashboard.
This analysis does not argue for abandoning local government engagement. It argues for redesigning it around an honest theory of change — one where local planning is understood as one layer of a vertically integrated reform approach, not as a self-contained delivery mechanism.
Local governments can genuinely contribute to coordinating community engagement, managing the routine operation of small schemes, collecting service data, and advocating upwards for national investment and reform. What they structurally cannot do — without changes at higher levels — is finance capital investment at meaningful scale, sustain complex infrastructure when central transfers are delayed or contingent, attract qualified professionals without supportive civil service frameworks, or enforce service standards when regulatory authority is not vested at their level.
The structural prerequisites are: adequate and predictable fiscal transfers aligned with assigned competences; a regulatory framework with authority at the appropriate level; national investment programmes that follow local plans rather than substituting for them; and a civil service framework that enables districts to staff their functions. These decisions are made at levels above local government. That is where transformation-oriented engagement must be directed.
For support organisations, this means systematically engaging ministries of finance and planning — not only sector line ministries. It means making intergovernmental fiscal architecture a core object of technical assistance. It means using local data to build pressure for structural reform. And it means being honest with donors about what local-level programmes can and cannot achieve.
The districts I have worked with deserve support designed for what they actually face — not for what we wish their institutional conditions allowed. This starts with support organisations that are honest about what they are looking at. As IRC is adapting its direction, it is a commitment to engaging the fiscal systems, institutional architecture, and political economy that determine whether local systems become self-sustaining.
I am coming to some of these conclusions later than I should have. But that is exactly why I am writing this.
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Juste Nansi is Director of IRC Africa — an organisation evolving toward structural engagement with the conditions that determine whether water and sanitation systems become genuinely self-sustaining. He has supported water governance reforms in more than fifteen countries across Sub-Saharan Africa.
Data sources: SNG-WOFI (OECD/UCLG) Country Profiles 2022 — Ghana, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger; UNCDF (2019); IRC internal programme documentation, 2016–2024.
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