How to access the Nairobi water rationing timetable online

There are times when you may want to access the Nairobi water rationing timetable – in order to check when you are scheduled to have water and when your taps are scheduled to be dry. Indeed, the Nairobi water rationing timetable can be accessed online, through the Nairobi City Water and Sewerage Company website.

What you need to be looking for, within the Nairobi City Water and Sewerage company’s website is something called ‘Equitable Water Distribution Program’. That is the politically-korrect name for Nairobi water rationing timetable.

The first thing you need to do is enter the Nairobi City Water and Sewerage company website’s address (nairobiwater.co.ke) into your browser. You can enter it into the Google Search box or you can enter it near the top of the browser, within the address bar.

Once you get to the Nairobi City Water and Sewerage company’s website, you will find a navigation menu at the top – you know, the one with links like ‘Home’, ‘About Us’, ‘Services’, ‘Media Center’, ‘Online Services’, ‘FAQs’ and ‘Contact Us’. From that navigation menu, you should point your mouse at ‘Media Center’, at which point a drop down menu with items like ‘News Watch’, ‘Tenders’, ‘Public Notices’, ‘Press Releases’… and so on appears. From that drop down menu, you click on ‘Public Notices’. [So you first point your mouse cursor at ‘Media Center’, then from the options that appear, click on ‘Public Notices’]. On the page that you are taken to, browse through the various notices until you find the one for Nairobi Water Rationing timetable (which, as we said, is officially known as the  'Equitable Water Distribution Program’) and click on it. On the page that you are taken to, you should be able to find the Nairobi Water Rationing schedule, typically in the PDF format. You will then need to skim through the program/timetable, to see when you are scheduled to have water and plan accordingly.

By the way, how did we end up with almost permanent water rationing in Nairobi? Well, I think there are several factors to explain this. One would be the fact that the Nairobi City population and size grew, in the last 4 decades or so, at a much faster rate than had been anticipated. Thus, the original water supply system was unable to cope, necessitating the water rationing measures. There is also the fact that the people who were in charge of Nairobi were unable to plan properly. And then there have been allegations that corruptions may be to blame for Nairobi’s water problems, as money that could have been used to set up new dams/new water sources for Nairobi could have been diverted to other uses. Add to this the politics of the 80s and 90s – when Kenya’s development had almost stagnated, due to apparent reluctance to help Kenya on the part of development partners. And that was at a time when some of the development partners we are working with lately hadn’t yet come into the picture, meaning that we had to deal with the old development partners who were often not very fast to set up huge development projects. That is, huge projects like the dams needed to resolve Nairobi’s water problems. But of late, there seems to be concerted efforts to address Nairobi’s water problems (and eventually do away with Nairobi water rationing). Though, as one of the people in charge of that issue put it, the challenge may be with us for quite some time: because setting up the necessary water supply and distribution systems requires a lot of money. And even when the money is available, it requires quite some time as those are rather complex engineering projects.