Community Management and the Demand for ‘Water for All’ in Angola’s Musseques

The Angolan State’s post-war center-piece reconstruction program, to provide the human right to ‘Water to All’, remains incomplete. The majority of Angola’s peri-urban communities still use the informal market to fill the gap. Water selling is the largest sub-sector of Luanda’s extensive informal economy, involving extractors, transporters and retailers. Negotiating for water at the local household level involves significant trading in social capital. Communities in Angola’s musseques have built on neighborhood solidarity to manage the supply of water themselves. The article is drawn from the authors’ experience in practice to examine the complexity of Angola’s informal
water economy and local-level innovative responses. The Government has drawn on these lessons and adopted the community management model MoGeCA (the Portuguese language acronym for Model of Community Water Management)to help address the shortfall. The article is written from a practitioner’s point of view, based on more than a decade of experimentation in practice and support from USAID and UNICEF in taking community management to the national scale.