The concept of water governance refers to the set of political, social, economic, and administrative systems that regulate the development and management of water resources ([27]). This definition remains an essential reference. However, contemporary approaches, such as the African Water Vision 2063 promoted by the African Union and AMCOW ([1]), broaden this definition by incorporating the issues of climate resilience, cross-border cooperation, and diversified financing.

Water governance is therefore no longer limited to institutional and organizational dimensions alone: it now includes the capacity of states and communities to anticipate crises, mobilize autonomous operators, strengthen independent regulation, and actively involve users. This evolution demonstrates that water governance in Africa is approached with a forward-looking and inclusive mindset, where the combination of strong regulators, efficient operators, engaged citizens, and diverse funding sources is the key to sustainable and equitable management of water resources.

Water service provision in Africa oscillates between public, private, and hybrid models, following a historical trajectory marked by four phases: 1) centralized and technocratic management during the colonial and postcolonial periods; 2) the crisis of public models and the privatizations imposed by structural adjustment programs in the 1980s and 1990s; 3) the emergence of public-private partnerships and decentralized management in the 2000s; 4) the search for hybrid models adapted to local contexts in the post-2015 period ([2]).

The most common water governance models in Africa are public management, public service delegation (PSD), community-based governance, and independent regulation. These four models reflect the diversity of the continent’s institutional and socioeconomic contexts. Each has its advantages and limitations: public management ensures state control but often suffers from administrative red tape; public service delegation harnesses the efficiency of the private sector but can exacerbate inequalities in access; community-based governance promotes local ownership but remains vulnerable to financial and technical challenges; finally, independent regulation ensures greater transparency but depends on institutional strength.

Jaglin’s seminal work ([11]) on African cities has demonstrated that this plurality of formal and informal service delivery regimes constitutes a structural characteristic of urban water systems, rather than a temporary dysfunction. This pluralism requires a governance framework capable of coordinating actors with diverse rationales. Indeed, no single model offers a universal solution: the most promising approaches are those that combine a strong regulator, autonomous operators, engaged users, and diversified financing mechanisms, thereby reducing exclusive dependence on the state and strengthening the resilience of water management systems. In the context of secondary cities in French-speaking West Africa, there is a need to align the professionalization of operators with a simultaneous strengthening of the capacities of local governments as delegated project owners, emphasizing the political dimension of this reform.

Public service delegation is defined as a contract whereby a public authority (the delegating authority) entrusts an operator (the delegate) with the management of a public service for which it retains responsibility, for a fixed term and in exchange for compensation substantially linked to operational results. Togolese Law No. 2010-006 of June 18, 2010, on the organization of public drinking water services, defines three main forms of delegation: concession, lease, and public management with profit-sharing. Each is distinguished by the level of risk-sharing and operational responsibilities. Article 2 of the law distinguishes the forms by the obligations placed on the delegate. Under a concession, the delegate operates the service at its own cost and risk and must also develop the facilities, including asset management and investments. Under a lease, it operates at its own cost and risk and keeps existing facilities in working order, while investment stays with delegating authority. The contracts studied here are leases.

Leasing, the form adopted under PAGEPC, is a contract whereby the delegating authority entrusts the operation of the service to an operator (the lessee), who provides the service at its own expense and risk, collecting tariff revenues while paying a royalty to the municipality. In a hybrid system, the authority retains ownership of the infrastructure and bears the cost of major investments. This model has the advantage of limiting the lessee’s financial commitments while introducing performance incentives.

Public service delegation (PSD) in the water sector in sub-Saharan Africa illustrates a hybrid model in which the public authority retains ownership of the infrastructure and covers major investments, while operations are entrusted to private operators. This model limits the lessee’s financial commitments, introduces performance-based incentives, and promotes greater accountability among local stakeholders. Experiences in Niger, Burkina Faso, and Chad show that public-private partnerships (PPPs) can be a viable solution for small towns, provided they are accompanied by strong regulation and rigorous institutional oversight ([19]; [20]).

The logic of shared responsibilities in the lease agreement is based on three pillars: 1) the lessee is responsible for technical and commercial operations (production, distribution, routine maintenance, customer management, and bill collection) and is compensated exclusively from tariff revenues; 2) the municipality, as the contracting authority, guarantees investments, monitors contract performance, and develops the investment program submitted to the regulator; 3) the Regulatory Authority for the Drinking Water and Electricity Sectors (ARSE) ensures independent regulation of the sector, approves rates, and imposes penalties for breaches of contract (Law No. 2011-024 of July 4, 2011). This structure aims to align the incentives of the parties while maintaining the public service mission.

The concept of the secondary city—understood as an intermediate urban agglomeration linking metropolitan areas and rural areas ([32])—has seen a resurgence of analytical interest following the work of Roberts and Tacoli ([26]; [33]) on urban growth in sub-Saharan Africa. These cities are characterized by weak local institutional capacities, insufficient economies of scale for networked services, a high proportion of low-income households, and structural diversity in supply sources.

In Togo, national policy classifies Noépé and Kovié as semi-urban areas (populations exceeding 1500 inhabitants that are not prefectural capitals), which determines the applicable institutional framework.

Applying delegation models from large cities to small African urban centers poses specific challenges documented by several authors ([14]). From a financial perspective, service sustainability is difficult to achieve due to lower population densities, limited connection rates, reduced payment capacity, and insufficient economies of scale ([5]). They emphasize the need for sufficient regulatory capacity to prevent regulatory capture. The financial sustainability of water services no longer depends solely on the tariff structure and collection rates, but also on the financial credibility and capacity of institutions to mobilize diversified financing. [18] shows that a combination of appropriate pricing, targeted cross-subsidies, effective collection, and transparent governance is essential to attract donors and ensure the sustainability of services.

At the institutional level, the capacity of local delegating authorities generally remains weak: a lack of qualified human resources, a deficit in technical legitimacy, and difficulties in ensuring oversight and regulation ([16]). On the supply side, local private operators are poorly structured, undercapitalized, and have limited access to financing ([5]). The fragmentation of responsibilities among the central government, local authorities, and parastatal entities leads to conflicts of jurisdiction and gray areas that undermine service effectiveness. They highlight the critical role of social intermediation in the phase where communities adopt the new model.

In Togo, the water and sanitation sector has undergone several institutional reforms since the 1990s. Law No. 2010-004 of June 14, 2010, establishing the Water Code, introduced an institutional framework aimed at clarifying responsibilities among the central government (sectoral policy, regulation), local governments (organizing authority), and operators (operation). Interministerial Decree No.013/MEHV/MATDDT of September 20, 2022, marked another milestone by authorizing municipalities to act as delegating authorities for public drinking water and sanitation services, paving the way for the effective decentralization of governance in the sector.

There is a clear distinction between urban management, handled by Togolaise des Eaux (TdE), and small towns, for which municipalities have been responsible since the 2019 decentralization reform. However, most of these small towns still lack a stable management model: community-based management is considered structurally deficient there ([6]), while the national operator’s operating costs appear disproportionate to their scale. Delegation to a private operator is being piloted as a third option, particularly in the Maritime region in the south of the country, with the support of specialized non-governmental organizations. The PAGEPC initiative is taking place within this transitional institutional framework. The municipalities of Zio 2 (Kovié) and Avé 2 (Noépé) represent the first concrete applications of the new legal framework in small Togolese urban centers.

The theory of polycentric governance, conceptualized by Elinor Ostrom, posits that institutional arrangements involving multiple autonomous decision-making centers can produce better results than those of a monopolistic or exclusively community-based management system ([30]). In a polycentric system, multiple authorities (state, municipal, community, private, and technical and financial partners) simultaneously participate in the provision and regulation of a public service, creating effects of functional redundancy, mutual learning, and shared responsibility ([23]). This framework proves particularly relevant for analyzing the water sector in Togolese secondary cities, where the diversity of actors—the state (asset management company), SP-EAU (operating company), TdE (national operator), ARSE (regulator), municipalities and community associations, and private operators—constitutes not an anomaly but a structural reality that governance must organize. [4] demonstrated, from an international comparative perspective, that water service users are better served by pluralistic institutions than by public monopolies or unregulated markets.

From an operational perspective, this study draws on three analytical dimensions derived from [22] work on institutional rules: 1) constitutional rules, which define who can participate in decisions regarding water services and under what terms (national legal framework, municipal ordinances); 2) collective rules, which govern delegation procedures, contracts, and oversight mechanisms; 3) operational rules, which govern the day-to-day interactions between the farmer, the municipality, the ARSE, and users (pricing, billing, maintenance, complaints). This framework allows for a systematic analysis of the points of failure observed in the two cases studied. [24] expanded this framework by highlighting the learning capacity of polycentric governance systems and their adaptability to change. In the Togolese context, this dimension is crucial: the transition from a community-based model to a leasehold model is not merely a change in operator, but a transformation of the institutional rules of the game that requires collective learning on the part of all stakeholders.

The literature review reveals that the choice of leasing aligns with national strategic guidelines. At the local level, both municipalities had identified improving access to water as a priority in their municipal development plans. The leasing contracts signed in both municipalities share the following characteristics: a six-year term, an exclusive operating area, revenue sharing (3% to the municipality, 2% to the ARSE), and joint monitoring by the municipality, the DAEP, and the ARSE. The operator CHAT-EAU manages the Kovié-Mission-Tové network, which resulted from the transformation of the former AUSEPA into a limited liability company (December 2021); ACA-BTP manages the Aképé-Noépé network (Table 1).

Table 1. Comparison of lease contract characteristics in Kovié and Noépé.

Source: Data collect 2025, and Commune d’Avé 2, 2026; Commune de Zio 2 & CHAT-EAU Sarl, 2026.

The distribution of daily water consumption reveals significant variation among households and between localities. The analysis reveals a bimodal distribution (Figure 2): a concentration in both the low ranges (<60 liters/day: 25.9% in Kovié, 37.1% in Noépé) and the high ranges (>150 liters/day: 29.2% in Kovié, 32.9% in Noépé). These differences are statistically significant between the two localities (chi-square (5, n = 707) = 22.7; p < 0.001).

This bimodal profile reflects the existence of two distinct consumption patterns: on the one hand, households constrained by distance, cost, or outages in the formal water supply network; on the other, households with access to free alternative sources (rice paddy canals, rainwater, boreholes). This finding is paradoxically confirmed

Figure 2. Daily water consumption per household.

by the Spearman correlation between quantity consumed and distance (rho = 0.307; p < 0.001): households living more than 500 m from their drinking-water source consume more than those living closer (n = 707; distance is coded in two classes). Distance, however, largely separates source types, and the survey records a single main source per household, so the diversification explanation could not be tested. This counterintuitive finding can be explained by the diversification of water sources among distant households, which combine multiple supply sources to meet their needs. This result is consistent with the concept of the structural plurality of water supply systems identified by [11] and argues for water policies that incorporate informal practices rather than ignoring them.

Mechanism tests (Table A2 and Table A3). Distance is coded into two categories (less than or greater than 500 m) and refers to the primary drinking water source reported by the household, rather than the formal network. As the questionnaire records only one primary source per household, it is impossible to reconstruct source combinations or directly test for diversification. The data show that 80% of households located more than 500 m from their source use a free source (rice field canal, Akatsè dam, rainwater tank), compared to 20% of those located less than 500 m away (chi-square (2) = 332.9; p < 0.001). Among users of network water points (public standpipe or private connection; n = 213), there is no link between distance and consumption (rho = −0.01; p = 0.94). This association appears among users of free sources (rho = 0.18; p < 0.001; n = 420) and those using boreholes (rho = 0.43; p < 0.001; n = 74, of which only 10 live more than 500 m away). It is more pronounced in Noépé (rho = 0.48; p < 0.001) than in Kovié (rho = 0.10; p = 0.07). In an ordinal logistic regression model, distance remains significant after adjusting for location and source type (OR = 2.02; 95% CI: 1.38 - 2.95; Table A3, Model 3), and users of free sources consume more than those using the piped network (OR = 1.93; 95% CI: 1.29 - 2.89). As household size and occupancy status were not recorded, it is not possible to adjust for these variables or for per capita consumption. We interpret this result as reflecting a difference in supply patterns: households located far from a paid distribution point obtain water from free, unmetered sources—where no tariff limits consumption volumes—without necessarily enjoying better service.

Furthermore, the survey data also reveal a significant gender burden in water collection: women and girls shoulder most water collection tasks, accounting for more than two-thirds of those responsible for this activity in the households surveyed. This aspect must be incorporated into the design of pricing policies and mechanisms for access to water points. Women are named among the people who fetch water in 597 of 712 households (83.8%), children in 12.5% and men in 3.7%.

The satisfaction results in Figure 3 are striking: 96.9% of households in Kovié and 97.7% of those in Noépé report being dissatisfied with the community-based management of their water point. This near-unanimous dissatisfaction shows no statistically significant difference between the two localities (chi² = 0.18; p = 0.67), indicating that it is common to both cases, regardless of the management model in place.

Figure 3. Satisfaction with the community-based management of the water service.

The perception of community-based management’s ability to ensure sustainable access to water, as shown in Figure 4, is also very negative: 87.2% of households in Kovié and 84.7% in Noépé believe that this management model cannot guarantee the sustainability of the service. This opinion does not differ significantly between the two localities (chi² (2) = 0.95; p = 0.62), confirming that rejection of the community-based model is a shared view, independent of local experience with the DSP. The recurring reasons identified in the focus groups are internal conflicts related to fund management, lack of control over leaks and illegal connections, irregular service, low flow rates, organizational instability, and lack of investment in network development.

Figure 4. Perception of community management as a guarantee of sustainable access.

Table 2 reveals an analytically significant dissociation between institutional visibility and trust. On the one hand, awareness of the management body differs significantly by locality (chi² (2, n = 712) = 12.7; p = 0.002; Cramér’s V = 0.13): in Kovié, 44.8% of households report that a management body exists, compared to 39.4% in Noépé. Even more striking, half of the households in Noépé (50.7%) and 38.7% of those in Kovié say they do not know whether such a body exists, despite a delegated operator at both sites (CHAT-EAU in Kovié since March 2023). This lack of awareness can be partly explained by the fact that CHAT-EAU was created through the transformation of the former AUSEPA team into a private company. Users therefore equate the new operator with the old community-based system, revealing a lack of communication and a failure on the part of the lessee to reposition its identity. Of the 161 Kovié households that report a management body, 93 cannot say which one, 52 name the AUSEPA or the water committee, and only 13 name the company. In Noépé, of 135 answers, 93 cannot say which body, 40 name the AUSEPA or the committee, and none name the company. On the other hand, distrust of the community-based model is consistent across both sites (chi² (2) = 0.95; p = 0.622), confirming that this rejection is structural and independent of knowledge of the DSP system.

Table 2. Awareness of the managing body and trust in community-based management.

Despite the documented institutional challenges, the DSP pilot through the PAGEPC has yielded encouraging operational results, particularly in Kovié. CHAT-EAU reports a collection rate of 85 to 90 percent, compared to a rate of virtually zero under AUSEPA management, and provides continuous water availability throughout the year. The network was expanded by an additional 4 kilometers between 2021 and 2024. An analysis of the network’s performance (Figure 5) shows an average network efficiency (billed volume divided by produced volume) of 67.16% for the 2024-2025 period in Kovié: the volume produced averages 4765 m³, while the average billed volume is 3213 m³. Service interruptions average 46 hours per month, with exceptional peaks of 5 to 7 days in May-August 2024.

In Noépé, the operator ACA-BTP reports a collection rate of 82% (April 2025) and network recovery rates ranging from 48% (April) to 84% (August), with an estimated annual average of approximately 65%. While these performance metrics remain superior to those of the AUSEPA, they reveal only partial adoption of the digital system: ACA-BTP continues to submit physical reports due to a lack of proficiency with the mWater platform, unlike CHAT-EAU, which makes full use of it. This disparity in digital adoption highlights the importance of technological capabilities in the governance of mini grids.

Table 3 gives the source, period and calculation method of each operational indicator and separates operator-reported figures from independently verified ones.

Qualitative data document failures at every level of the polycentric institutional architecture. At the national level, ARSE reports non-compliance with the PPP law, the absence of a formal tariff policy, and the non-payment of fees. At the asset operator level, SP-EAU faces chronic non-collection of its receivables from TdE, leading to a situation of mutual insolvency. At the municipal level, the municipalities of Zio 2 and Avé 2 lack specialized human resources to fulfill their role as delegated project owners.

Figure 5. Management performance of the Mission-Tové-Kovié (MTK) drinking water network.

Table 3. Operational indicators: source, period, calculation method and verification status.

In Noépé, a phenomenon of institutional capture was observed: former members of AUSEPA, who had become municipal councilors, blocked the implementation of the DSP to protect their interests in the existing community-based system. This phenomenon, documented in the literature on decentralization in Africa ([17]; [28]; [35]), constitutes a major obstacle to water governance reform and raises the question of the scale at which this capture operates—in this case, at the sub-municipal level, rather than at the national or sectoral levels as previously assumed in the literature.

By institutional capture we mean the use of an elected office to steer a public decision toward interests formed in a previous role, as opposed to the capture of a regulator by the firm it regulates. The Noépé finding rests on 9 of the 14 interviews, on 3 in the Noépé focus group and on documents: council minutes, correspondence. The accounts identify refusal to sign the deliberation approving the lease, non-adoption of the tariff decision, and blocked payment of the operator by councilors who had sat on the AUSEPA committee. We coded an episode as intentional obstruction only when three conditions held: a specific act or refusal was attributed to identifiable actors; at least two independent sources corroborated it (two interviewees from different institutions, or an interview and a document); and the accounts or documents tied the act to the actors’ stake in the former AUSEPA. Opposition was voiced through ordinary council debate and vote was coded as routine political disagreement, and postponements explained by procedure, budget or missing skills as implementation delay. Episodes meeting only one or two conditions are reported as allegations. The councilors concerned were interviewed. Their motives are therefore inferred from accounts and documents, not observed directly.

The results call for a more nuanced view of the prevailing narrative regarding the superiority of private management of water services. While delegation has led to improvements in certain aspects of service (reliability, expansion, and revenue collection), it has not produced the radical transformation that was expected. This situation confirms critical analyses suggesting that simply replacing a public manager with a private one does not guarantee efficiency: efficiency depends on the quality of the institutional framework, regulation, the contract, and the balance of power ([15]). A significant proportion of the private operators involved in the delegated management of mini grids come from the informal sector and lack experience in navigating the sector’s contractual and technical rules. This lack of professionalization is a recurring factor contributing to the fragility of the systems, particularly in Néopé.

A key lesson concerns the difficulty of establishing an effective delegating authority at the municipal level in small African towns. The study of OECD and AMCOW ([1]; [21]) confirms that regulatory challenges in developing countries are not limited to national agencies.

When decentralized to the local level, regulation faces additional constraints: limited technical capacity, institutional fragmentation, a lack of financial resources, and difficulties in coordinating among stakeholders. This research shows that while local regulation promotes proximity and adaptation to local realities, it requires strengthened mechanisms for transparency, financing, and oversight to prevent the proliferation of challenges already identified at the national level.

However, in an ideal polycentric system as defined by Ostrom, the multiplicity of control centers (municipalities, ARSE, SP-EAU, technical partners) should compensate for the weakness of each actor taken individually, thanks to the effects of functional redundancy and mutual learning. Our results show that this mechanism does not work here: the asymmetry in institutional capacities is too pronounced for redundancy to be effective. Municipalities lack the qualified human resources, financial resources, and technical legitimacy to fully carry out their role. Information asymmetry favors the operators ([1]), creating a risk of regulatory capture. This observation constitutes a theoretical contribution to the literature on polycentric governance: polycentricity is not in itself a guarantee of effectiveness when the capacities of decision-making centers are fundamentally unequal.

Experience highlights the ambivalence of small local private operators. Their deep roots in the local community facilitate close ties with users and an understanding of local social dynamics. However, their structural fragility (low capitalization, lax management systems, short-term focus, and risk aversion) significantly limits their performance and their ability to invest in sustainable infrastructure or training ([5]). This fragility raises questions about the model’s sustainability in the medium term without ongoing support.

Furthermore, private operators in these two localities are driven more by a profit motive than by commitment to public service, which limits the program’s impact on local development. The failure of certain operators to integrate into the local social fabric creates lasting problems, sometimes leading to the use of alternative sources.

How can social accessibility be reconciled with financial viability? This equation, already complex in large cities, becomes virtually unsolvable in small towns where consumption volumes are low and unit costs are high. The literature on water pricing in developing countries has consistently emphasized the need for well-targeted subsidy and equalization mechanisms to reconcile equity, affordability and financial sustainability ([9]; [34]). In our cases, no institutional subsidy or equalization system has been established on a sustainable basis. The social rates currently in place are viable only in the short term thanks to project subsidies; in the medium term, either rates will have to increase significantly—with the risk of exclusion—or a sustainable public subsidy mechanism will have to be established.

Long-term technical and institutional support has proven essential. Local actors cannot take ownership of such a complex governance model without substantial external support, which is not limited to the transfer of technical skills but also encompasses facilitation, mediation among actors, and, temporarily, the assumption of substitute functions in critical areas. However, this support carries a risk of dependency—an “autopilot syndrome”—that delays the genuine empowerment of local actors ([3]). The design of support projects should incorporate explicit indicators of empowerment: the proportion of the operating budget that is self-financed, the rate of decisions made without external intervention, and the ability to resolve contractual conflicts without third-party mediation.

The transfer of drinking water management from community associations to private operators, in the form of a lease, in Togolese peri-urban areas such as Aképé and Mission Tové, illustrates a structural tension between technical efficiency and social legitimacy. From the perspective of common-pool resources theory ([30]), community management committees were based on locally developed rules for access and maintenance, tailored to households’ ability to contribute and the rhythms of village life; their replacement by a private operator disrupts this polycentric governance by imposing standardized pricing and maintenance standards, which are often disconnected from previous customary arrangements. While this technical rationalization does indeed improve certain performance indicators (service continuity, water quality, reduction in breakdowns left unrepaired due to a lack of local expertise), it also transforms the mechanisms through which access to water is secured. Rather than relying primarily on collectively negotiated rights and community-based governance, access increasingly depends on households’ ability to pay user fees, reinforcing market-based allocation mechanisms and reshaping local power relations and social inequalities ([8]; [10]). This evolution is consistent with [25] theory of access mechanisms, which emphasizes that access is determined not only by formal rights but also by ability to derive benefits from resources. The most vulnerable households, which previously benefited from informal solidarity arrangements or payment extensions tolerated by village committees, now face strict tariff exclusion. This restructuring has sparked localized resistance: challenges to the legitimacy of the operator, who is perceived as an outsider; questioning of traditional authority, which is now bypassed in mediating access to water; and, in some cases, the reactivation of informal water points outside the delegated system.

This phenomenon is reinforced by an institutional dynamic documented in Noépé: former leaders of the AUSEPA committees, far from being side-lined by decentralization, have, in Noépé, repositioned themselves within the newly elected municipal councils, converting their former authority in community management into local political capital. This personal continuity transforms resistance into internal institutional obstruction. Rather than manifesting on the fringes of the system, opposition to the delegation now resides at the very heart of the body supposed to oversee and monitor it, as certain municipal councilors from the former AUSEPA refuse to endorse or facilitate the implementation of the contract with the delegate.

The Togolese DSP in this sector thus illustrates a recurring paradox of delegated management reforms in West Africa. The gain in technical performance comes at the cost of an erosion of community control over a resource historically managed as a common, revealing that managerial efficiency and the social embeddedness of the service do not necessarily progress hand in hand.

Four original theoretical contributions emerge from this analysis.

First contribution: polycentricity in the context of fragile decentralization. Polycentric governance, as defined by Ostrom, predicts that the proliferation of decision-making centers improves the efficiency and resilience of systems ([30]). Our results show that this prediction does not hold when the institutional capacities of the various centers are fundamentally asymmetrical. In such a context, polycentricity can paradoxically generate more conflicts of jurisdiction than synergies. This nuance enriches the work of [4] by emphasizing that the effectiveness of polycentricity is contingent upon a minimum level of capacity at each decision-making center.

Second contribution: institutional capture at the sub-municipal level. The phenomenon of institutional capture has been documented in literature primarily at the national or sectoral level ([17]; [28]; [35]). Our results from Noépé, based on the evidence in Section 4.5, indicate that it can also operate at the sub-municipal level: former community managers, now serving as local elected officials, have used their positions to block governance reforms to protect their interests. This local-level capture is potentially more difficult to detect and counter than national institutional capture, as it blends in with legitimate local political dynamics.

Third contribution: the consumption paradox and the plurality of water supply regimes. The positive and significant correlation between distance from the formal network and the amount of water consumed (rho = 0.307; p < 0.001) is a counterintuitive result that calls for reinterpretation through the accessory of [25]. Effective access to water resources does not depend solely on physical proximity to the formal water supply network, but on a set of access mechanisms (relational, economic, institutional) that enable households far from a paid water point to draw large volumes from free sources. This finding calls for a reconceptualization of “coverage” of water services, incorporating the diversity of service regimes as defined by [11]. This reading rests on the source-type analysis in Section 4.2 (Table A2 and TableA3). The cross-sectional design supports an association, not a causal claim, and higher volumes from free sources do not imply better service.

Fourth contribution: The analysis shows that the transition from the community model to the DSP represents an institutional paradigm shift. The DSP embodies the theory of New Public Management and the partial privatization of public services, in which technical and financial efficiency is sought through the involvement of a private operator. Thus, the improvements observed—such as network expansion, private connections, standpipes, and improved collection rates—are not merely practical outcomes but also concrete manifestations of a theoretical framework: one that posits that outsourcing management improves service performance and sustainability. However, the study also highlights the limitations of this theoretical framework: sustainability remains fragile, and private operators do not always possess sufficient institutional and technical capacity. This qualifies the theoretical scope and prompts a discussion of the model’s validity in rural or semi-urban contexts.