Why the Kigali 2026 leadership symposium is the moment Africa's water sector cannot afford to miss

This is precisely what the Africa Water and Sanitation Systems Leadership Symposium, taking place from 17 to 21 August 2026 in Kigali, Rwanda, is designed to address. And it is why I believe the Symposium deserves far more than routine attendance — it demands strategic engagement from anyone who takes Africa's institutional future seriously.

The Year of Water deserves more than ceremony

The African Union has designated 2026 as the Year of Water, structured around the theme of assuring sustainable water availability and safe sanitation systems to achieve the goals of Agenda 2063. Several high-level events will mark the year across the continent. But we should be honest with ourselves: most of these events will focus on reaffirming political commitment, mobilising visibility, and celebrating progress. There is nothing wrong with that. Political anchoring matters.

What the Year of Water lacks, however, is a dedicated continental platform where the difficult operational questions are confronted head-on. How do we professionalise public utilities that lose more water than they deliver? How do we design tariff frameworks that recover costs without excluding the poor? How do we build regulatory institutions that can hold service providers accountable over decades, not project cycles? How do we mobilise domestic finance at the scale that external aid has never delivered and never will?

The Symposium in Kigali fills these gaps. Convened by AMCOW, hosted by the Government of Rwanda under the High Patronage of H.E. President Paul Kagame, and technically coordinated by IRC Africa, the Symposium is the only event in the Year of Water calendar explicitly dedicated to systems transformation — to the governance, institutional, financial, and human capital architecture that determines whether water and sanitation services actually function, at scale, over time.

From Addis Ababa to Kigali: a logic of consequence

The Africa Water Vision 2063 is built around eight vision statements covering everything from universal service access to transboundary cooperation and the circular sanitation economy. Among these, Vision Statement 4 calls for good governance systems grounded in international water law. Vision Statement 7 demands human capital development and adaptive learning. Vision Statement 8 insists on legitimised water information systems that reshape economic planning.

These three — governance, capacity, and information — are the ones the Symposium in Kigali advances. This reflects a deliberate reading of where Africa's water sector has consistently fallen short: not in policy formulation or pilot projects, but in the institutional plumbing that connects political will to service delivery outcomes.

The Symposium's four transformation pillars — Leadership, Regulation and Accountability, Professionalisation, and Strategic Public Finance — are drawn directly from the lessons of the past twenty years. We have learned, sometimes painfully, that infrastructure without institutional backing deteriorates. That external finance without domestic resource mobilisation creates dependency and makes sustainability questionable. That decentralisation without capacity and regulatory oversight leads to weak performance, non-compliance and fragmentation. The Symposium in Kigali proposes to address these lessons not through another round of technical recommendations, but through structured dialogues that bring together the actors who actually hold the levers: ministers of water and finance, regulators, utility managers, development finance institutions, commercial banks, and the private sector.

What Ethiopia's experience tells us about the stakes

I have spent over two decades working in Ethiopia's water and sanitation sector — from junior to senior expert as a hydrogeologist, a programme implementer, and currently as the lead of IRC's country team in Addis Ababa. Ethiopia illustrates both the promise and the challenges of systems transformation.

The country has political commitment. The One WASH National Programme is a flagship of multi-sectoral and government-led initiative that has been under implementation since 2013. A lot has been invested in the sector by mobilising resources both from government treasuries and development partners; prioritised woredas and towns have benefited from the Consolidated WASH Accounts (CWA), which is a pool fund under OWNP; further they received specialised technical assistance to develop and execute medium-term strategies and business plans. As part of professionalising WASH service delivery, government has issued proclamations, directives and guidelines and has legalised the volunteer-based Water Sanitation and Hygiene Committees (WASHCOs) leading to Water User Associations and Unions. Despite all these efforts and an on-going reform, the gap between policy intent and sustained services remains wide. Coordination, planning and execution capacity, service sustainability, and gaps in sector financing are among the key challenges. Many rural water points fail within years of construction; non-revenue water is still high. The sector depends heavily on external finance. Climate variability compounds every structural weakness.

This is the continental condition, and Ethiopia might not be an exception. What the Symposium in Kigali offers is a space where countries can bring their reform experience to the table — not to display successes but to work through real obstacles with peers, regulators, and financiers who face similar constraints.

The road to the UN Water Conference runs through Kigali

There is a strategic calendar dimension that should not be overlooked. The UN Water Conference, co-hosted by Senegal and the United Arab Emirates, takes place in December 2026. Africa will need to arrive with a credible, unified position — not another declaration of need, but a demonstrable agenda of institutional reform and investment readiness.

The Symposium in Kigali is where that position will be forged. The expected Kigali Declaration on Systems Transformation will provide a continental mandate for reforms across the four pillars. The Institutional Empowerment Platform will offer countries a mechanism to structure reform-driven pipelines and connect institutional improvements with investment. And the Country Reform Partnerships initiated in Kigali will signal that Africa is building its own solutions.
For those of us who have spent years arguing that Africa's water crisis is primarily an institutional credibility problem, this sequence — from the Vision's endorsement in February, through the Symposium in August, to the UN Conference in December 2026— represents the most coherent window of opportunity in a decade.

Who should be in Kigali — and why

The Symposium is designed for over 1,000 participants. But I want to speak directly to a few groups:

• To ministers and senior officials: the political dialogues are structured to produce alignment between water and finance ministries — the alignment without which domestic resource mobilisation remains rhetorical. Your presence for the substantive sessions will determine whether the Kigali Declaration carries weight.
• To regulators and utility leaders: the strategic dialogues on regulation and professionalisation are designed around peer exchange. This is where you will find counterparts facing the same challenges — tariff reform, performance monitoring, workforce retention — and where practical solutions can emerge.
• To development finance institutions and commercial banks: the investment dialogues connect reform champions with financing opportunities. If you are looking for bankable water sector opportunities in Africa, the Symposium in Kigali is where those opportunities will be articulated.
• To young entrepreneurs and innovators: the entire Symposium is premised on the idea that Africa's water future will be built by a new generation combining technical competence with institutional literacy. The Symposium in Kigali is where you connect with the leaders shaping the systems you will inherit.

A personal conviction

In my role at IRC Ethiopia, and in my responsibilities for this Symposium — which include mobilising engagement with the African Union Commission and coordinating Ethiopia's participation — I approach the Symposium in Kigali with a conviction shaped by field experience: the sector does not need more projects, it needs stronger systems. It does not need more external finance as a first resort, it needs domestic institutions credible enough to attract and manage investment. It does not need more declarations, it needs a sustained process for turning declarations into institutional practice.