Presentation short abstract

Desalination is promoted to solve Mombasa’s water stress, yet large projects have stalled. Instead, costly small-scale plants by firms and NGOs serve select areas, making water far pricier than public supply. These uneven rollouts deepen inequality and refragment urban space in coastal Kenya.

Presentation long abstract

‘New water’ technologies are increasingly being rolled out in certain countries and regions in sub-Saharan Africa to address water access challenges. The incipient political ecology literature on this topic suggests that in contexts already characterised by water inequalities, the use of desalination tends to exacerbate uneven development and lead to new forms of fragmentation (see Campero et al. 2023; Fragkou 2018; Scheba and Scheba 2018; Velasquez and Wachtendorf 2023; Williams et al. 2023).

Desalination has been widely presented as a water management solution for coastal Kenya, particularly Mombasa; the country’s second-largest city. Investors and the global desalination industry are attracted to Mombasa because of its combination of severe water stress, growing industry and a large population accustomed to paying high rates for water on the informal market. There have been several attempts to develop large-scale projects along the coast through Kenya’s public-private partnership directorate, but none of these have come to fruition, mostly for financial and political reasons. Instead, there has been a proliferation of small and medium-scale decentralised desalination facilities, led by companies and NGOs such as Texas-based Give Power. While many see these initiatives as positive, the water produced is typically at least five times more expensive to consumers than what public water companies are allowed to charge, and only certain neighbourhoods are deemed suitable for such facilities to be financially sustainable. The result is that desalination is driving a refragmentation of urban space in coastal Kenya.