Water balance by country · Updated 2026-09-30
Non-revenue water in Kenya and East Africa: WASREB Impact reports, the 25% benchmark and the IWA balance
How Kenyan water service providers and their East African counterparts calculate the IWA water balance for WASREB, EWURA, WSRB and NWSC reporting, with intermittent supply, informal settlements and low pressure handled correctly.
Calculator settings for Kenya & East Africa
- Units
- Metric
- Benchmark category
- Low & middle income
- Meter location
- At the plot boundary; 0–3 m service pipe; large unmetered/kiosk share in informal areas
- Supply
- Frequently intermittent — enter hours/day by zone
- Reporting
- WASREB Impact report (Kenya, NRW benchmark 25%, good practice <20%); EWURA (Tanzania); NWSC / Ministry of Water (Uganda); WASAC (Rwanda)
Kenya's water regulator WASREB publishes NRW for every licensed water service provider in its annual Impact report and sets a sector benchmark of 25%, with under 20% as good practice; the national average has stayed above 40%. Tanzania's EWURA, Uganda's NWSC and Rwanda's WASAC report on similar bases. Because much of the region's supply is intermittent and a large share of customers are served through kiosks and shared connections, the IWA balance has to be built carefully or it misleads.
East African specifics
- Intermittent supply is the norm outside the largest cities. Enter hours of supply by zone so that losses are expressed 'when the system is pressurised' — otherwise a provider that supplies 6 hours a day looks far better than it is.
- Water kiosks, yard taps and shared connections: count each metered point as one connection; consumption through kiosks is billed metered (to the kiosk operator).
- Informal settlements with spaghetti networks and illegal connections are the largest apparent-loss driver in Nairobi, Mombasa, Kampala and Dar es Salaam; use the provider's revenue-protection records and carry ±50%.
- Low pressures (5–20 m) make the ILI unreliable in many systems; use the low-and-middle-income category and report litres per connection per day per metre of pressure.
- Treatment is 'traditional' for river and dam sources; boreholes with chlorination are 'basic'.
Typical results
The better-performing providers (Nyeri, Nairobi's best zones, NWSC Kampala) sit in band B to C; most are in D with real losses above 400 litres per connection per day (w.s.p.). Pressure management and DMA programmes funded by KfW, the World Bank and AfDB have shown fast payback, and the calculator's what-if levers are a practical way to size a proposal for those funders in the units they expect.