| dc.description.abstract | In the world over water and its supply has a significant impact on people's lives. These impacts touch on almost all aspects of our lives from health to socio- economic. Even though water is a very important scarce commodity its quantity over the years has continually decreased with the increasing population and destructive environmental activities. This had been these despite the fact that the Government kept increasing the budget allocated to the water sector . It was for this reasons under the Water Act of 2002 that the Government rolled out an ambitious program dubbed Water sector reform program to decentralise and bring in water stakeholders in the management of water. This therefore led to the need of undertaking a study to make of impact this program on the management of water in this nation.
The independent variables that were considered for the study were poverty alleviation, availability of enough water and water of good quality, conflict resolution and stakeholder/ community participation in the management of water. The study area identified was Kikuyu town in Kiambu County. The Town was selected because even though it was the source of water to the City of Nairobi, it remained water deficient. The town population was the target group and a simple random sampling was used to identify 350 respondents for the study. Questionnaires with closed ended questions were used to collect data as well as observation and interview methods. The findings from this study have shown good management of water is crucial for the effective water supply and achievement of Vision 2030. In the study it was noted that though there has been an improvement in the quality of the service by changing the main players from the government to the companies and the people, the program should also invest in new water sources as it was found that even though people had the necessary infrastructure, most got water barely once a week. The quality of water was applauded by most of the respondents as they commented that is was of high quality.
The cost of the water was found to be on the higher side and a third of the respondents complained that they were unable to meet the cost of water per month as it was way above what they could comfortably afford. This was noted as one of the impediments of the effective utilisation of this program. Conflicts which are mostly caused by lack of resources which in this case is water were found to have declined with time. This could have been directly attributed to the inclusion of the community in the management of water. It was noted by most of the respondents that most of the conflicts that they have witnessed had been solved by the community and they were of the opinion that the community is the best placed institution to solve these conflicts. This affirms the spirit of the Water Sector Reform Program which had the intention of including the stakeholders who are the community. On community involvement the study found that community involvement was high with a higher number of projects started by the community as compared with other organizations such as NGOs and the Government. It was also noted that the community was involved as key stakeholders in Government and NGO projects. | en_US |
