4. Domestic Water Supply

The legal framework on domestic household water use and sanitation specifically mandates the Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System to engage in capital infrastructure and water distribution in Metro Manila. On the other hand, the water districts and municipal-government-administered water works play a key role in the supply, distribution, and management at the local level. Historically, these water institutions have paid less attention to sanitation and have focused more on water provisioning. Insufficient public investments and mismanagement have led to serious gaps in performance. The patterns of water use in the domestic household sector follow the country’s demographic distribution where urban and town centers are favored infrastructure-wise over rural and urbanizing areas. This chapter identifies the inefficiencies, the gaps in access by the poor, and the poor participation by consumers in water district schemes in urban areas. It also describes the challenges of rural villages distant from town centers that remain underserved or with crude water provisioning schemes. Urbanizing areas suffer from competing uses between households and small-scale industries and the attendant pollution arising from unregulated wastewater-dumping activities. Incipient attempts at reform either at the community or local government level toward improving domestic household water use and sanitation are mapped out.