15. My Water, My Choice! The Role of Citizens in Ensuring Equitable Access to Water in Soweto East Village—Nairobi

The chapter highlights the local governance structure of disenfranchised citizens and their role in self-mobilization to enforce democratic innovations in governing their water resources, an important issue confronting the governing of urban Africa. In the wake of lack of accomplishment of the Millennium Development Goals, these failures manifest themselves in the form of competition for urban services with an increasingly high rate of inequality between planned and unplanned settlements, further depicting a lack of leadership in policy implementation and political goodwill of the governance systems in upholding the sustainability agenda. Ethnographic surveys and interviews were used to acquire information relevant to the study and indicate that citizen empowerment is a panacea to development.