Bureaucratic Blockages: Water, Civil Servants, and Community in Tanzania

How do civil servants in district water and sanitation departments address problems of water access in rural communities in Tanzania? What are the bureaucratic procedures they follow? How do the bureaucratic procedures around formulating budgets, managing money, and interacting with communities impede or enhance their ability to manage water projects? This report addresses these and related questions by examining the social, economic, and political contexts in which Tanzanian civil servants in the water sector work. This research focuses on civil servants employed by water and sanitation departments in district offices, where infrastructure projects are initiated and managed by engineers and technicians in coordination with the private sector and community organizations. Using qualitative research from two of these water and sanitation departments, this report shows that the institutional and bureaucratic contexts in which civil servants work redirect their attention away from maintaining existing infrastructure and towards building new water projects. The focus on new projects corresponds to their efforts to answer the objectives of higher levels of government. Improving water access depends on the shared efforts of civil servants and community groups to maintain existing projects. Civil servants' focus on new projects therefore poses a problem to ensuring that they work community organizations and maintain existing water projects.