When economists shut off your water

David Legge Avatar

Research report by Adrian Wilson, Irene Nduta, and Somo Abdi; published on Africasacountry.com in November 2023, based on research conducted in 2022. ///

Access to water in Nairobi is horribly unequal. The World Bank, Nairobi Water Company, and development economists exploited this unjust context to treat poor Kenyans like guinea pigs.

In August 2020, people all over the development world started talking about water in Nairobi. There was a lot of anger, and some calls for sending people to the guillotine. The reason: the publication of results from a development randomized controlled trial (RCT), run by two American development economists, working together with the World Bank. In order to compel property owners in Kayole-Soweto—a relatively poor neighborhood in eastern Nairobi—to pay their water bills, this experiment disconnected the water supply at randomly selected low-income rental properties.

Click here to read the full report.


Comments

Leave a Reply