May 12, 2026
In Kenya and many other developing countries, people living in low-income and peri-urban areas still lack access to safe drinking water through public utilities. Doctor of Science in Technology Japheth Koros has studied how small-scale water service providers help fill this gap – and what kind of support they need to operate sustainably.
Koros completed his doctoral degree at Tampere University in December 2025. Before and during his doctoral studies, he worked on projects related to water resources conservation and community capacity development in Kenya and Tanzania. Through this work, he saw both the potential of communities and the limits they face without stronger public support.
“I observed that citizens have a significant potential to transform how water is managed,” Koros says. “But significant impact is only possible with direct support and collaboration with the government.”
Erkki Paasikivi Foundation has supported Japheth Koros’s doctoral research between 2021 and 2025. The foundation’s goal is a world where clean water is available to all. Achieving this requires not only technical solutions, but also a deep understanding of local contexts, as well as social innovation and structural change. Koros’s research offers concrete perspectives on these challenges.
Koros focused his research on small-scale water service producers operating in urban Kenya. These may be individuals with boreholes, neighbourhood associations, cooperatives, community-based organisations, churches or NGOs. What they have in common is that they serve areas where public water utilities often do not reach.
According to Koros, this makes them especially important in low-income and peri-urban areas.
His research shows that these providers have real strengths. Because their systems are small and closely connected to the communities they serve, they are often seen as dependable. They also tend to have very low water losses compared with larger municipal systems.
“They are considered to be very reliable,” Koros says. “Some people even consider them more reliable than the municipal ones.”
At the same time, the providers face serious challenges. Many lack adequate technology, technical skills and proper water treatment capacity. Their production costs are high, and they often operate without policy support, subsidies or training that would help them improve.
One of the clearest messages in Koros’s research is that this is not only a technical issue. It is also a question of inequality. Current policy and licensing systems are designed for larger utilities with more resources and stronger formal structures. Small community-based providers often cannot meet these requirements, even when they are serving people who would otherwise have no service at all.
“The policy environment to support small-scale water service providers is missing,” Koros says.
In practice, this means that the poorest communities may remain dependent on weaker systems that receive little public support. Koros argues that governments should look at the issue first and foremost through the lens of equality.
“The government's goal should be to ensure safe drinking water for the last person – for the poorest person,” he says. “When they think about it that way, then they will start thinking about how to empower the actors in low-income areas”
Those agents are often the small-scale providers already operating in these communities.
Koros does not suggest that small-scale providers should be left to manage on their own. Instead, he sees a need for more realistic regulations, better collaboration with government, technical training and, in some cases, subsidies. In areas where a purely commercial model cannot work, public support is needed to improve service quality and reduce inequality.
Although the exact solutions may differ from country to country, Koros believes the issue is relevant beyond Kenya as well. In many rapidly growing urban areas in Africa, communities are already stepping in where public systems cannot keep up. His research suggests that instead of treating these actors as informal or marginal, governments should recognize their role and help strengthen it.