SMUS APRI 2025 Postdoctoral Fellows – Policy brief series on wicked urban problems in African cities – Corruption in Kisumu’s water and sanitation sector
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Joel Ongwech
The 2025 SMUS–APRI Urban Africa Post-Doctoral Research Scholarship Programme was designed to strengthen postdoctoral researchers’ ability to communicate findings on urban “wicked problems” in African cities to policymakers and the public at large through a series of policy briefs.
The resulting APRI special series, “Wicked Urban Problems in African Cities: Rethinking Policy and Practice”, comprises four briefs by Dr Mildred M. Ambani Songoro, Dr Calvince Ouko Othoo, and Dr Emmanuel Amponsah, with guest contributors Mourice Wambua Kausya and Brunilde Verrier. Each brief tackles a distinct urban challenge: a failed transit system, a broken mapping workflow, corruption in water provision, and the persistence of illegal electricity connections. Read together, the briefs highlight a recurring urban policy dilemma in which behaviours treated as problematic are often rational responses to conditions of systemic exclusion.
The wicked urban problems highlighted in the policy briefs are systemic, politically contested and mutate as actors respond to attempted fixes, so that one-dimensional fixes generate new harms rather than resolving existing challenges. These recurring paradoxes, or “wicked problems,” as Rittel & Webber (1973) call them, form the theoretical basis of this series.
Corruption in Kisumu’s water and sanitation sector
Dr Calvince Ouko Othoo’s policy brief examines corruption in Kisumu’s water and sanitation sector. Anti-corruption frameworks exist nationally; county bylaws exist locally. As a result, in Kisumu’s informal settlements, bribery for connections, fraudulent billing, favouritism and engineered delays persist because the integrity architecture was built to catch national grand corruption at the institutional level, not petty grassroots extraction.
Drawing on focus groups and a physical survey of 334 sanitation facilities and 88 water points across Kisumu’s six most populous informal settlements, the brief maps both the forms of corruption and the policy gaps that sustain them. It shows that petty corruption runs on bribes for basic connections, manipulated bills, extortion through service disruption and compromised inspections, all of which are rooted in years of state neglect. In sum, what residents experience is a daily tax on health, dignity and money, one levied most heavily on those least able to contest it (Plummer & Cross, 2006).
Summary
- Corruption leads to the misappropriation of a large portion (25-40%) of resources allocated for water and sanitation programmes in developing nations. This has a particularly severe impact on low-income areas, such as urban informal settlements or low-income areas. Kenya’s anti-corruption commission has reported that over half of the annual non-revenue losses in its water sector are attributable to corrupt practices.
- This study, while focused on Kisumu City, the capital of the County of Kisumu, where county policies and bylaws have influence, draws lessons for other cities in Kenya and beyond.
- Despite comprehensive national frameworks to combat corruption and local policies and bylaws at the devolved county units, corruption remains a persistent challenge in the water and sanitation sector in Kisumu City.
- Community perception mapping revealed the prevalence of corruption within the water and sanitation sector. Bribery was the most common form, accounting for 23% of cases, followed by fraudulent billing at 18%. Favouritism constituted 15% of reported instances, while manipulated service delays and both metre theft and extortion represented 11% and 10% respectively. The least common form of corruption was compromised surveillance or inspection, at 5%.
To read the full policy brief, please click the image above or click on the following link: https://doi.org/10.59184/pb026.08.