This is baseline survey on access to water for domestic use and social accountability in four districts of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s largest city, and Morogoro, a provincial town around 200 kilometres west of Dar. From 7th to 29th March 2018, the survey team interviewed 2,154 adults about their access to water, perceptions of water quality, sanitation and hygiene facilities, readiness to pay for water services, social accountability for water provision, civic engagement and social demographics. The survey included core questions developed by the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) for Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene, as well as questions on social accountability and civic engagement developed in previous rounds of the Afrobarometer, Asian Barometer, European Social Survey and Twaweza’s SzW survey programmes. This pilot research project was carried out by the University of Glasgow’s Schools of Social and Political Sciences, Mathematics and Statistics, and Engineering in collaboration with Department of Geography, University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) and two NGOs active in the water sector in Tanzania, Shahidi wa Maji (SwM) and Water Witness International (WWI), Edinburgh. We aimed to investigate how local behaviour, motivations, and cultural and institutional constraints affect community-based efforts to make water governance institutions responsive to local needs in Dar Es Salaam and the town of Morogoro, Tanzania. We carried out a baseline survey of residents of four districts of Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania’s largest city, and, for comparison, Morogoro, a provincial town some 200 km west of Dar. Between 7 and 29 March 2018, a team from UDSM interviewed 2154 urban citizens about their access to water, perceptions of water quality, sanitation and hygiene facilities, readiness to pay for water services, social accountability for water provision, civic engagement and social and economic circumstances. In collaboration with the Ministry of Water and Irrigation’s Dar es Salaam office, we also collected water quality data at 45 selected survey sampling points, finding strong evidence of salinity and low oxygen content in well water as well as high returns on the presence of coliforms in tap water. We have provided training for one MA student in Public Health (at UDSM) and one assistant lecturer in Geography to do an in depth interviews in water quality in Temeke and measure water quality using a probe. Geo-referenced data were gathered with the water quality data to allow mapping. Finally, we held an interdisciplinary, international workshop to evaluate outcomes and review opportunities for future research, connecting with 84 researchers and practitioners working on problems of social accountability for sustainable water in 22 countries of the developing world.

This survey aimed to establish: a) levels of access to safe and sustainable water for domestic use; and b) capabilities to hold water governance institutions accountable for such provision. It focused on the four mainly residential districts of Dar es Salaam--Kinondoni, Ilala, Temeke and Ubungo—and, for comparison, the urban area of Morogoro, a town around 200 kilometres distant from Dar es Salaam. Kigamboni district in Dar es Salaam was excluded because of its low residential population and because it is not supplied with water by DAWASCO, instead relying mostly on dug wells. The surveyed area has a total population of about 5.888 million people. The initial target was to collect data from 2100 households, including 1750 households from Dar es Salaam and 350 households from Morogoro.