Persistent Water Shortage in Kigali City: Who are the Most Affected?

Abstract

Kigali, the capital city of Rwanda has been demographically growing and is expected to double from 1.13 million of population in 2012 to two million by 2020. Both population growth and city surface expansion have created a burden that the existing basic infrastructures can’t sustain. The question is how such a huge burden is shared between those who are better-off economically and the poorer ones. In this paper, the issue was examined in the sense to investigate whether the shortage makes water expensive to the extent that poorer families get hard to afford it? Findings have shown that the poorer families are the most affected since they have limited financial means to afford a high cost to cover such a basic daily need. Most of them live in old suburbs whereby water pipes’ network does not ease water flow-in because they are old or damaged. They are also far from putting in place support equipments such as tanks to store water when it comes in the taps. Beyond all those cases, water becomes a very expensive product which they can’t afford given the minimum wages of a Rwandan laborer in Kigali.