Making water PPPs work for Africa: Lessons from global journeys and African realities

A few months ago, the release of the UK Independent Water Commission report sparked lively debates on LinkedIn about the future of water governance. Many colleagues shared thoughtful analyses. I wrote my own piece back in July, reflecting on what Ghana’s rural water reform could learn  from the English experience—especially the importance of professionalisation, coherent regulation, and disciplined financing.

Then, Joel Kolker published a very insightful article in Global Water Intelligence , drawing broader lessons for developing countries from the UK’s water crisis. His piece triggered a fascinating thread of comments—some pointing to other Public-Private Partnership (PPP) experiences, especially the French delegation models (affermage and concessions) that have been used for decades in several African countries, sometimes cited as stunningly successful.

Reading those exchanges, I felt compelled to contribute a more structured reflection. Having worked across the continent for two decades and having studied how PPPs have evolved in Africa since the 1990s, I wanted to share what the evidence actually says—and what Africa can truly learn from both the UK and French models trajectories. 

Through my own experience in West and Central Africa, I’ve seen that the weakest link in most PPPs is regulation. Many countries still lack a clear legal mandate, adequate resources, or political independence for their regulators. Reports by ESAWAS, the World Bank and OECD confirm that monitoring and tariff review systems remain underdeveloped across much of the continent.

How can any PPP model succeed when the referee is missing or silenced? Even the best private operator will struggle—or take advantage—if no one ensures the balance between cost recovery, equity, and quality. The French affermage worked in its early years precisely because price-setting and performance monitoring were disciplined. When those controls slackened, as Senegal’s retrospective analysis shows, the system began to falter under the weight of debt, tariff freezes, and unclear responsibilities.

This is the first lesson from global experience: no model can replace the regulator. Without credible oversight, every PPP—whether French, British, or home-grown—eventually collapses under the weight of its own contradictions. 

Many African reforms assumed that engaging a private operator would also secure the necessary investment capital. That’s rarely how water PPPs work. In practice—particularly under affermage—the operator brings in management and working capital while most expansion CapEx is funded by tariffs, budgets, and development finance institutions (DFIs). The UK’s 2024 Price Review (24PR) shows the same logic in a mature setting: record investment is mobilised through regulated bills and public-rules finance, not “free private money.”

For Africa, the lesson is simple: use PPPs to raise efficiency and creditworthiness, then align them with a realistic mix of tariffs, taxes and transfers (3Ts) and concessional finance. The expectation that PPPs will fund the system outright is what leads to the delays, soft budgetary bailouts, and shift in contractual arrangements. 

Over the years, I’ve read and witnessed many contract renegotiations—some in good faith, others opportunistic. The Mali case studies on rural water PPPs  show how uncertainty and demand variability make renegotiation inevitable. What matters is not avoiding it but institutionalising clear rules for when and how it happens.

This is one reason I find the UK’s regulatory cycle (PR24, Competition and Markets Authority review) instructive: it accepts that conditions change but manages change transparently. Africa can and should design its own version of such a discipline. 

The early results of affermage contracts in Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire were impressive: improved collection rates, reduced non-revenue water, and steady expansion. But the same reviews warn that efficiency gains diminish when rules are relaxed, when tariff freezes persist, or when responsibilities between public and private partners become blurred.

This reminds us that beyond models, systems are key. Even a sound model will eventually fail if the governance around it collapses. The same contract can thrive in one decade and struggle in the next, depending on the integrity of those managing it.

Tariff freezes are politically popular but financially toxic. Both the UK and West African reviews show that when affordability isn’t managed transparently—through clear social tariffs or budgeted subsidies—it ends up as hidden debt or service decline. In Africa, we must stop pretending that affordability can be maintained by operator benevolence or unspoken cross-subsidies. It requires political honesty and explicit budgeting. 

Let us be careful not to blame some models or idealise others. Models are only as good as what people and their systems do with them—whether in good or bad faith, by prioritising or sacrificing public, social, and environmental interests in favour of private, political, or financial ones.

From my perspective, Africa’s challenge is not just to choose a model but to build integrity into whichever model it adopts. This means cultivating competent regulators, designing transparent financing strategies, and ensuring contracts serve the citizen before the shareholder. That is what both the UK and French journeys ultimately teach us. 

Africa’s debate on PPPs should now evolve from imitation to introspection. We must build African-owned regulatory systems, strengthen domestic capital markets, and nurture a generation of public managers who can negotiate and supervise on equal footing with private operators. Our success will not be measured by the number of PPP contracts signed, but by the trust and sustainability they deliver.

At the Systems Leadership Symposium – Transformation, Investment and Sustainability of Water and Sanitation in Africa (Kigali, 2026), I hope to see regulators, governments, utilities, and DFIs from across the continent engage in these reflections—not to import new ideologies, but to define how Africa can lead its own governance and financing models for water and sanitation.

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