Utilities & Urban Water

The MENA region is one of the most urbanised places on earth. Roughly seven in ten people live in cities, and the cities keep growing faster than their pipes. Urban systems carry the region's hardest water job: delivering a daily service from a scarce, distant resource, through networks that leak, to customers who often pay less than the water costs. When water stress becomes news, it is usually urban: rationing in Amman, outages in Damascus, taps run dry in Basra's summer.

The global arithmetic is stark. Utilities lose about 346 million m³ of water every day, or 126 billion m³ a year, conservatively worth US$39 billion. Several of the world's highest national loss rates are in this region. Dubai, at the other extreme, publishes about 4.5%, among the lowest figures any large utility reports.⁴⁰

Performance spans the full global range. At one end, Gulf utilities run world-class networks: Dubai's DEWA reports distribution losses around 5%, among the lowest anywhere, with near-universal smart metering. At the other end, intermittent supply is normal. Amman distributes by rota, roughly weekly, while Algiers and Tripoli cycle by district and conflict cities rebuild networks between outages. In between, giants like Cairo and Riyadh pour capital into treatment and transmission while chasing losses through their distribution mazes. Saudi planning figures put national water losses at 33% in 2025, against a target of about 15% by 2031.⁴² A KAPSARC paper cites Riyadh data showing 34% non-revenue water, 21 points physical and 13 commercial.⁴³ Refugee inflows, from Syrians in Jordan and Lebanon to displaced Iraqis and Yemenis, compress a decade of demand growth into a few years.

World Bank World Development Indicators, latest available.

Reading a loss figure without being misled by it

Why the percentage is the wrong comparator

Non-revenue water is a ratio to the volume put into supply, and that volume depends on supply hours, pressure and demand. None of those are comparable between a rationed city and a continuously pressurised one.

A World Bank paper co-authored by Roland Liemberger works the example: identical physical leakage reads as 20% under intermittent supply and 29% under continuous. A utility can therefore improve its network and watch its headline number rise.

Amman: 44.7%, and falling on every volumetric measure

Miyahuna reported 44.7% in 2023. Its network is pressurised 22.6% of the time and 1.2% of subscribers receive continuous supply, so most households store water in roof tanks.

The volumetric series tells the opposite story to the headline. Loss per connection fell from 1.25 to 0.99 cubic metres a day between 2019 and 2023, and loss per kilometre of main from 25.5 to 23.5. The 2023 rise in the percentage was the Balqa merger: excluding Balqa, whose own losses ran at 62.2%, Miyahuna was at 38.9%.

Dubai: 4.5%, and not fully auditable

DEWA reported 4.5% in 2024 and 4.4% in 2025, among the lowest figures published anywhere. The structural advantages behind it are a young network, continuous pressure and near-total metering, none of which is a management choice a Jordanian utility could copy.

The figure also does not fully reconcile. DEWA publishes no water balance and no definition of what its loss figure covers, and its own statistics booklets imply gaps of 8.1% in 2023 and 8.5% in 2024 against those headlines.

Why donor programmes have struggled here

More than JOD 1.28 billion has been committed to non-revenue water in Jordan alone. An EU-funded policy review in May 2024 tabulated the results: a KfW programme of EUR 18.8 million in Karak with no impact and a post-evaluation reporting an increase in losses, a EUR 28.5 million programme in the north with little impact, and a USAID programme of USD 42.5 million whose gains were not sustained because operations staff breached the zonal boundaries the scheme depended on.

The zone breach is the transferable lesson. District metering only works if operators respect the districts, and during a shortage the incentive to open a valve beats the incentive to protect a measurement.

What to ask for instead

Losses per connection per day, or per kilometre of main, survive comparison between systems where a percentage does not. On that basis the gap between these two cities is wider than the headline suggests, not narrower: roughly 77 litres per account per day in Dubai against about 990 measured in Amman.

One scheme in this sector, examined in full: what was built, what it cost, what worked and what did not.

The hub's headline metric for all twenty countries. Hover, tap or focus a country; the ranked table sits alongside.

What comes out of the tap is a utility performance question as much as a resource question. Across the region, the water leaving a treatment works is usually compliant. The risk sits between there and the kitchen: intermittent supply, pressure loss, contaminated storage tanks and ageing pipe.

Intermittent supply is the core problem. When a network is pressurised only a few hours a week, pipes depressurise between cycles, and groundwater and sewage are drawn in through joints and cracks. That is still normal in much of Iraq, Yemen and Syria, and in parts of Jordan and Lebanon. Households then store water in rooftop tanks that are rarely cleaned. Continuous pressurisation is therefore one of the highest-value public-health interventions a utility can make, quite apart from what it does for losses.

Salinity and aquifer contamination are covered in the Groundwater & Aquifers hub; treatment standards and discharge limits in Wastewater & Water Reuse.

Industry is a small share of regional withdrawals, typically a few per cent, but a disproportionate share of the water market. Industrial users pay something close to the real cost, and they buy engineering rather than subsidy.

Oil and gas is the largest of these demands. It generates produced water at scale and needs injection water to maintain reservoir pressure, so treatment, reinjection and disposal are a standing business across the Gulf, Iraq and Algeria. Iraq's Common Seawater Supply Project exists precisely to substitute seawater for fresh water in oil-field injection. Power generation is the second: plants need cooling water, which is why they cluster on the coast and why water and electricity procurement are joined. The third is the industrial cities, Jubail, Yanbu, Sohar and Ain Sokhna, which run dedicated water and effluent systems, increasingly fed by treated wastewater rather than desalinated supply.

The commercial direction of travel is toward reuse. Industrial users are the natural first customers for treated effluent, since they need volume and reliability rather than potable quality, and they can sign a bankable offtake.

Water scarcity dominates the region’s reputation, but floods are its most frequent disaster. The World Bank counted 213 floods in 15 countries between 1900 and 2011, killing almost 19,000 people.¹ Flash flooding is rising in cities across the region. Over the decade before 2014 the number of flash floods, and of people affected or killed, doubled.¹ The Bank blames mainly concrete surfaces that cannot absorb water, poor drainage and building in low-lying areas.¹

Why desert cities flood

Many cities are built across the paths that storm water has always taken. In Jeddah, runoff from the eastern hills reaches the Red Sea through wadis that are now urban districts. Slums and construction in the valleys made the floods worse.² In Algiers in 2001, relief officials pointed to the city’s steep terrain, dense population and overbuilt stream beds.³ Sprawl onto alluvial channels cuts infiltration and raises flood peaks, even in short, light rain.⁴ Standard design methods can also underestimate the risk. In Muscat’s Wadi Aday, regional curve numbers gave peak flows on average 19% higher than the standard approach.⁵ Most of the region still lacks comprehensive protection from wadi flash floods, and single structures such as dams and embankments remain the norm.⁶

The climate is adding pressure. The IPCC reports an observed increase in extreme precipitation across south-west Asia, mostly in elevated areas.⁷ WMO’s first report on the Arab region found 2024 the hottest year on record there, with more extreme rainfall and storms accompanying the warming.⁸ A 2025 study found the April 2024 UAE storm was made worse by human-caused warming and by changes in land use.⁹

The record

Death tolls often differ between sources and change as searches continue. The table gives the range reported, not a single number.

The April 2024 storm showed what a modern Gulf city faces. More than 142 mm fell on Dubai in 24 hours, against an average of 94.7 mm a year at the airport.²¹ Dubai International cancelled 1,244 flights over two days.²² Insured losses were estimated at US$2.9–3.4 billion, and property insurance rates rose by 15%.⁹ Smaller Gulf cities have been caught out too. Doha received 136 mm in under three weeks in 2018, against an annual average of about 75 mm.²³ Kuwait had 98 mm in two days that November, and flooding submerged passages at the airport.²⁴

Sources: Al Jazeera (Dubai, 17 April 2024; Doha, 12 November 2018; Kuwait, 15 November 2018).

North Africa’s recent floods have exposed drainage as well as rainfall. In September 2024 floods in south-east Morocco killed at least 18 people, most of them in Tata.¹⁷ In December 2025 about an hour of heavy rain flooded at least 70 homes and businesses in Safi’s old city.²⁵ Prosecutors opened an investigation, and officials examined whether inadequate drainage made the flooding worse.²⁶ In February 2026 rain and releases from overfilled dams forced the evacuation of 143,164 people in north-west Morocco.²⁷ Tunisia had its heaviest rain in more than 70 years in January 2026, with 206 mm at Sidi Bou Said.²⁰

Flood protection

Dubai has made the largest single commitment. In June 2024, two months after the storm, it approved Tasreef, an AED30 billion programme to raise rainwater drainage capacity by 700% across the emirate.²⁸ The network is to be completed in stages by 2033.²⁹ Contracts worth Dh1.44 billion in April 2025 added more than 36 km of drainage lines linked to the main tunnel.³⁰ A second round worth Dh2.5 billion, covering 30 areas, followed in February 2026.³¹ Neighbourhood schemes are landing too. The first phase of a Dh500 million project in Al Quoz was completed in April 2026.³² Abu Dhabi approved updated stormwater drainage guidelines in 2022.³³

Elsewhere, dams and development-bank programmes carry the load. Oman has seven flood protection dams with a combined capacity of 247.73 million m³, and its current plan adds 33 dams, including flood protection dams such as Al Khoudh in Muscat.³⁴ In Taiz, a World Bank-financed project made major parts of the city, including downtown, secure against flash floods.¹ Morocco’s integrated disaster risk programme with the World Bank began with US$200 million in 2016.³⁵ A US$275 million loan with a catastrophe drawdown option followed in 2019.³⁶ After the 2024 floods Morocco launched a MAD 2.5 billion rehabilitation programme for 12 provinces.¹⁷ Tunisia’s US$50 million resilience programme, approved in 2021, funds physical works to cut urban flood risk.³⁷

Warning before the water

Soft measures such as early warning systems are still uncommon in wadi flood management across the region.⁶ Derna showed the cost. Libya’s warnings covered heavy rain and floods but not the risk from the ageing dams, and WMO called for multi-hazard warnings as a result.³⁸ Experts surveyed in Jeddah ranked river management and early warning as the most favoured measures.³⁹ For utilities and contractors, stormwater is becoming a procurement line of its own, from Dubai’s tunnel contracts to the drainage works in World Bank programmes.

Tracked urban water works: networks, metering and city-supply schemes.

The tracked projects in this sector and the structured procurements coming next, straight from our databases.

Projects

Urban water is where utility reform meets private contracts: management and performance contracts (NRW programmes in Amman and Saudi NWC's city clusters), corporatised utilities with regulated tariffs (Morocco's régies, Jordan's Miyahuna, Oman's Nama), and full concessions in a few markets (Casablanca's historic concession; Egypt's new PPP wave for treatment). Reference cases:

• Smart (AMI) metering and customer analytics: the Gulf standard, spreading to the Levant
• District metered areas + pressure management for intermittent-to-continuous conversion
• Acoustic and satellite leak detection on trunk and distribution mains
• Demand management: tariffs, retrofits, greywater and efficient fixtures
• Stormwater and flash-flood drainage (Jeddah's post-2009 programme)
• Digital twins and SCADA for whole-city operations

The urban service rulebook:

Indicative; service standards are set nationally.

Urban water's core economic problem is the gap between the cost of the next cubic metre, desalinated and then pumped uphill, and tariffs set for social protection. The gap is closed by subsidy, by cross-subsidy from industry, or by losses. Increasingly it is closed by making the existing metre go further. A utility that cuts losses from 40% to 20% has built itself a new desalination plant for a tenth of the price. That arithmetic is the business case behind every NRW and metering programme in this hub.

The bodies that commission, regulate or deliver in this sector, and the names that recur across its tenders.

• National Water Company (NWC)Utility · Saudi Arabia
• MiyahunaUtility · Jordan
• Dubai Electricity & Water Authority (DEWA)Utility · United Arab Emirates
• Environment Agency – Abu Dhabi (EAD)Environment · United Arab Emirates
• Holding Company for Water & Wastewater (HCWW)Utility · Egypt
• VeoliaDeveloper / operator · Regional
• SUEZDeveloper / operator · Regional

Mandates, procurement routes and the rest of the region’s institutions are in the decision-maker directory.

Where the near-term money is:

Urban demand keeps compounding through population, refugees and heat, while the marginal source of supply moves offshore. The cities that manage will be the ones that treat the network itself as the resource: measured, pressurised, digital and priced honestly. That template already runs in the Gulf.

Standing references for this sector. Every one is a real work and every link was checked.

• International Water Association, the professional body behind the water-balance and non-revenue water methodology utilities report against. iwa-network.org
• World Health Organization, Guidelines for Drinking-water Quality, fourth edition with addenda (2022). who.int
• FAO AQUASTAT, the standing database of national water resources, withdrawals and irrigated area. The denominator behind most figures on this site. fao.org