Kenya's water sector has a trust problem, not just a funding problem

Children drawing water from leaking pipe.[File, Standard]

In June this year, Kenya's water regulator, The Water Services Regulatory Board (WASREB), released some genuinely disturbing numbers. According to its latest Impact 18 Report, non-revenue water, which is treated water that never earns a shilling for the utility, has climbed to 48 per cent.

To put this into context, nearly one in every two litres of clean water pumped into our distribution networks disappears before it reaches a paying customer, lost to leaks, illegal connections, and billing failures. WASREB puts the annual cost at roughly Sh13.7 billion.

Think about what that money could have paid for instead: The next borehole, the next set of replacement pipes, the upgrade a struggling utility keeps postponing because the funds it should have collected simply vanished on the way to the tap.

Kenya's response has been to invest at scale. According to the Ministry of Water, Sanitation and Irrigation, close to Sh1 trillion is now earmarked to get piped water into every home by 2030. Smart meters are coming. Digital leak-detection tools are on the way. All this is necessary, but it's not enough.

Here's what nobody's saying out loud, Sh1 trillion can build better pipes. It can't, by itself, fix what happens to the water once it's already flowing through them. For that, you need to understand where that missing 48 per cent is actually going.

A smart meter can flag unusual consumption. A sensor can detect a leak. However, neither can make a decision. Once a problem is spotted, somebody inside the utility still has to be allowed to act on it, and that's where things quietly fall apart.

Picture a technician somewhere in Kenya, out on his morning rounds. He finds a burst pipe. He knows exactly how to fix it. But he can't touch it. Not yet. First, he needs a supervisor's sign-off, and the supervisor is in a meeting, travelling, or hasn't checked his phone since breakfast.

So, the technician waits. The water keeps running, straight into the ground, past every household that's been rationing since Monday.

Multiply that one small delay by thousands of technicians and thousands of decisions every week, across the country. That's a meaningful slice of the 48 per cent right there, not lost to bad infrastructure, but to a signature that took three days too long to arrive.

I didn't want to guess. So, I asked the people who'd actually know, the employees themselves. Over four years, I surveyed 368 of them across 13 public water and sewerage companies, looking for one answer: What genuinely separates a water company that performs from one that doesn't, when they share roughly the same budgets and the same tired infrastructure?

The result surprised me. I expected a story about vision and inspiration. Instead, the strongest predictor of performance was something almost embarrassingly simple: Whether ordinary employees were trusted to make decisions. Not consulted. Trusted, with real authority, to act. Companies that let frontline staff solve problems on the spot outperformed those that sent every decision up the chain and back down again.

What mattered far less surprised me too. Leaders who were consistent, principled, and led by good example, the kind of leadership most training programmes emphasise, showed almost no measurable effect on performance once everything else was accounted for. Being a good example builds respect. It doesn't unblock a pipe.

This isn't an argument against the Sh1 trillion plan. I want that money spent and spent well. But pouring new infrastructure into old habits is like fitting a smarter engine into a car whose driver still can't turn the wheel without asking someone else first. Infrastructure spending and leadership reform aren't competing priorities. They're two halves of the same fix, and only one is getting sustained attention.

Water sector boards and regulators could measure leaders on how much they delegate, not just how they present in a boardroom. A manager who's never handed real decisions to their team has a gap in their leadership, however polished they look.

Every utility could audit its own approval chains and ask honestly: How many signoffs sit with someone who's never seen the actual problem? Most exist out of habit, not necessity, and cutting them costs nothing.

Leadership training budgets could shift too. Kenya's water managers already have plenty of vision and values. What's missing is practical training in handing over real authority without it feeling like losing control.

None of these waits for the Sh1 trillion to land. It can start Monday morning, for the price of a decision.

Dr Joseph Njuguna holds a PhD in Organisational Leadership from Pan Africa Christian University. His doctoral research examined leadership and performance across public water and sewerage companies in Kenya. You can reach him via