Change Story
The plan that became law for an essential public service
In 2025, Kabarole and Bunyangabu Districts' Water Boards were formally 'gazetted' by the Government of Uganda, giving them legal recognition and the authority to oversee tariffs, contracts and service regulation. It may sound like an administrative step, but it marked a fundamental shift.
Establishing a legally recognised water board requires years of trust-building, collaboration, and careful institutional development. It began with a master plan: a costed, government-owned roadmap that brought together district leaders, service providers, and communities around a shared vision for water service delivery.
Riva supported this process by helping stakeholders including district leaders, service providers and communities to develop the plan and strengthen the systems needed to implement it. Martin Watsisi, of Riva Uganda, was involved from the early stages in Kabarole, supporting the newly established Board to understand its legal mandate and responsibilities, and helping the district develop the professional structures required to contract, regulate and oversee local service providers in partnership with Uganda’s Ministry of Water and Environment.
Martin says: “Gazetting of the Board changed the conversation. It transformed the District Board into a legally mandated institution that combines professional water service management with accountability to communities. It now has the authority to hold service providers accountable, protect investments, and improve service delivery, the result of years of collaboration and systems strengthening.”
Hon Richard Rwabuhinga has chaired Kabarole District Local Government since before Martin Watsisi joined the process. For years, he championed stronger accountability in how water investments were planned and managed.
A turning point came when he presented Kabarole’s approach at the Stockholm Water Week in 2015. He shared lessons with an audience beyond Uganda. The experience reinforced his belief that the accountability culture he had advocated for since 2012 was beginning to take root locally.
Today, he chairs quarterly accountability meetings that bring together engineers, community representatives, service providers, political leaders, and journalists to review progress against the district’s own plan. This platform exists because of years of deliberate institution-building by Kabarole, Riva, government partners, and other stakeholders.
What changed
A District Water Supply Services Board provides for the professional management of the water services in the district by contracting an area service provider and sets the tariffs with full consultation.
Kabarole’s experience has become a reference point for other districts with several visiting to learn from its approach. In 2023 Uganda's National Planning Authority endorsed the district master planning approach for integration into national planning processes. The experience from Kabarole and Bunyangabu has since informed national policy discussions, including work on sanitation and hygiene and climate adaptation.
Prof. Pamela Mbabazi, Executive Chairperson of the National Planning Authority, recognised the significance of the approach: “I am amazed at how much the water and environment sector is doing that is not getting enough attention. People want to associate with and fund winning innovations, and I am excited that the NPA can now support the sector to set common priorities, avoid small and fragmented investments, and pool resources.”
But the clearest evidence of change is in how decisions are locally made. "We were hell-bent on doing things our own way, especially those that would bring us political mileage, like building unplanned, unsafe water sources," says Peter Dauda Bazira, Chairperson of Kabarole's WASH task team. "But now we are more able to collaborate with other institutions."
What's next
An independent review of this work is now underway. It will document the journey, identify lessons, and provide other districts in Uganda and beyond with a clearer pathway towards establishing legally recognised and accountable water institutions.
The National Planning Authority’s adoption of the master planning approach demonstrates how locally developed solutions can influence national systems. Beyond Uganda, Ghana’s National Development Planning Commission reviewed its own planning guidelines in 2025 with similar ambitions of strengthening long-term public sector planning.
The experience from Kabarole and Bunyangabu shows that lasting change in public services is not only about building infrastructure. It is about building institutions that have the authority, capacity, and accountability to keep services working.
If you’d like to explore what it takes to make institutional change legally durable, we’d love to hear from you. Start a conversation.