Retrospective Analysis of the Urban Water Supply Sector in Senegal: A Public-Private Partnership Over Time

This study, commissioned by the AFD Innovation, Research and Knowledge department, provides a retrospective analysis of the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) that has been managing the urban water supply sub-sector in Senegal since 1995. For a number of years now, this PPP arrangement has been showing increasingly worrying signs of decline, to the point that several donors have decided to move to sovereign loans as they no longer have sufficient confidence in the ability of the public partner, the asset-holding company, to uphold its commitments. However, grounds for satisfaction remain. Senegal has achieved its access to water targets and the progress made in urban areas has been remarkable: Dakar has water supply coverage of over 98%, a figure that is around 80% in the area under PPP management. What is more, Senegal is one of only three countries in Africa where the household connection rate has grown by over 25%, behind Botswana (+52%) and ahead of Morocco (+25%), rising by + 33% between 1990 and 2015. In methodological terms, this study is based on a review of contractual documents (contracts, appendices and amendments produced since 1996), the two companies’ last ten annual reports (the asset-holding company and operator), as well as gray and academic literature. The aim of this initial stage has been to identify and describe the main turning points of the original PPP. It has been followed up by interviews with key sector stakeholders in February 2017 to determine the exact nature of these turning points and explain their causes and impacts.