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 often urban: rationing in Amman, taps run dry in Basra's summer.

Utilities lose about 346 million m³ of water every day, or 126 billion m³ a year, conservatively worth US$39 billion. ¹ Several of the world's highest national loss rates are in this region. Dubai, at the other extreme, reported 4.4% in 2025.²

Performance varies widely. At one end, Dubai's DEWA reports water-network losses of 4.4% (2025), with smart meters on all customer connections.^2 3 At the other end, intermittent supply is common: Amman households typically receive piped water two days a week.⁴ Saudi planning figures put national water losses at 33% in 2025, against a target of about 15% by 2031.⁵ A KAPSARC paper cites Riyadh data showing 34% non-revenue water, comprising 21% physical and 13% commercial losses.⁶ Refugee inflows add demand too: in Jordan, hosting Syrian refugees raised overall water demand in the northern governorates by 40% in a few years, according to a 2021 report by Germany’s Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research with Jordan’s Ministry of Water and Irrigation.⁷

World Bank World Development Indicators, urban population (% of total population), SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS, 2025.⁸

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.⁹

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.⁹

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.¹⁰ Households typically store water in rooftop tanks.⁴

The volumetric series moves the other way. 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%.¹⁰

Dubai: 4.4%, and not fully auditable

DEWA reported water-network losses of 4.4% in 2025.² The structural advantages behind it are an almost entirely desalinated supply, complete smart metering and the revenue to maintain both, none of which is a management choice a Jordanian utility could copy; that is this site’s reading, not a cited finding.^11 3

The figure also does not fully reconcile. DEWA’s annual statistics booklets report total water requirements and category-wise water consumption separately. Our arithmetic from those figures gives a gap of 8.1% in 2023 and 8.5% in 2024, compared with DEWA’s reported water-network losses of 4.6% and 4.5% for those years.^{12 11 13 14}

Why donor programmes have struggled here

More than JOD 1.28 billion has been committed to non-revenue water in Jordan alone. ¹⁵ An EU-funded policy review in May 2024 tabulated the results: a KfW programme of EUR 26.5 million in Karak with no impact on non-revenue water and a post-evaluation reporting an increase, a KfW programme of EUR 40.2 million in the northern governorates with little impact, and a USAID programme of USD 60 million whose gains were not sustained because operations staff breached the zonal boundaries the scheme depended on.¹⁵

The zone breach is the transferable lesson. District metering only works if operators respect the districts; the review found that operations units often violated zone boundaries in areas already rehabilitated.¹⁵

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: on this site’s arithmetic, roughly 77 litres per account per day in Dubai against about 990 per connection measured in Amman.^11 10 9

One case in this sector, examined in full.

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. Much of 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. Intermittent supply remains a feature of parts of Jordan: in 2023, continuity of supply was 22.6 per cent for Miyahuna and 5.4 per cent for Yarmouk Water Company.¹⁰ Households then store water in rooftop tanks.

Industry is a small share of regional withdrawals, typically a few per cent, but a disproportionate share of the water market.

Oil needs injection water to maintain reservoir pressure. In southern Iraq, the Common Seawater Supply Project will process and transport 5 million barrels of seawater a day to oil fields, replacing freshwater used to maintain pressure in oil wells.¹⁷ A study of six export industries across the region found that crude oil and refining accounted for 77.5% of the roughly 4.26 billion m³ of water those industries used in 2011, with repressurising oil fields the main use.¹⁸ Power plants need cooling water, which is why they cluster on the coast and why water and electricity procurement are joined.

Some industrial cities have their own water and effluent systems under a single operator. At Sohar, Majis runs seawater intake and cooling water, a reverse osmosis plant and a central plant that recycles treated effluent from the port and free zone into industrial process water.¹⁹ At Yanbu, Marafiq runs separate industrial and sanitary wastewater plants, whose treated water goes mainly to landscape irrigation, firefighting and non-potable utility use, while industry’s process water comes from the desalination plants.^20 21

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.²² 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.²² The Bank blames mainly concrete surfaces that cannot absorb water, poor drainage and building in low-lying areas.²²

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.²³ In Algiers in 2001, relief officials pointed to the city’s steep terrain, dense population and overbuilt stream beds.²⁴ Sprawl onto alluvial channels cuts infiltration and raises flood peaks, even in short, light rain.²⁵ 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.²⁶ Most of the region still lacks comprehensive protection from wadi flash floods, and single structures such as dams and embankments remain the norm.²⁷

The climate is adding pressure. The IPCC reports an observed increase in extreme precipitation across south-west Asia, mostly in elevated areas.²⁸ 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.²⁹ A 2025 study found the April 2024 UAE storm was made worse by human-caused warming and by changes in land use.³⁰

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.⁴² Dubai International cancelled 1,244 flights over two days.⁴³ Insured losses were estimated at US$2.9–3.4 billion, and property insurance rates rose by 15%.³⁰ 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.⁴⁴ Kuwait had 98 mm in two days that November, and flooding submerged passages at the airport.⁴⁵

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.³⁸ In December 2025 about an hour of heavy rain flooded at least 70 homes and businesses in Safi’s old city.⁴⁶ Prosecutors opened an investigation, and officials examined whether inadequate drainage made the flooding worse.⁴⁷ In February 2026 rain and releases from overfilled dams forced the evacuation of 143,164 people in north-west Morocco.⁴⁸ Tunisia had its heaviest rain in more than 70 years in January 2026, with 206 mm at Sidi Bou Said.⁴¹

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.⁴⁹ The network is to be completed in stages by 2033.⁵⁰ Contracts worth Dh1.44 billion in April 2025 added more than 36 km of drainage lines linked to the main tunnel.⁵¹ A second round worth Dh2.5 billion, covering 30 areas, followed in February 2026.⁵² Neighbourhood schemes are landing too. The first phase of a Dh500 million project in Al Quoz was completed in April 2026.⁵³ Abu Dhabi approved updated stormwater drainage guidelines in 2022.⁵⁴

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 plans 33 more dams, including flood-protection dams; the planned major schemes include Al Khoudh in Seeb, Muscat.⁵⁵ In Taiz, a World Bank-financed project made major parts of the city, including downtown, secure against flash floods.²² Morocco’s integrated disaster risk programme with the World Bank began with US$200 million in 2016.⁵⁶ A US$275 million loan with a catastrophe deferred drawdown option followed in 2019.⁵⁷ After the 2024 floods Morocco launched a MAD 2.5 billion rehabilitation programme for 12 provinces.³⁸ Tunisia’s Integrated Disaster Resilience Program, launched in 2021 with US$50 million in World Bank financing, received an additional US$50 million in 2026 and includes urban flood-protection works.⁵⁸

Warning before the water

Soft measures such as early warning systems are still uncommon in wadi flood management across the region.²⁷ 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.⁵⁹ Experts surveyed in Jeddah ranked river management and early warning as the most favoured measures.⁶⁰ 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: city supply schemes and treatment plants, network and non-revenue water programmes, distribution storage, and city sewerage and utility concessions. Wastewater plants, national bulk transmission and desalination sit on their own hubs.

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, including NRW programmes in Amman and Saudi NWC's regional clusters; corporatised utilities, including Morocco's regional multiservice companies, Jordan's Miyahuna and Oman's Nama; and plant-level PPPs in Egypt's treatment and desalination programmes. Casablanca's Lydec concession ended in October 2024. Reference cases:

• Smart (AMI) metering and customer analytics (in Dubai on all customer connections)
• 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 programme after the 2009 and 2011 floods)⁶¹
• Digital twins and SCADA for whole-city operations

The urban service rulebook:

Indicative; service standards are set nationally.

Lost water has a price. Liemberger and Wyatt value the water utilities lose worldwide at about US$39 billion a year, on a conservative US$0.31 a cubic metre.¹ For Saudi Arabia, a KAPSARC paper estimates what the kingdom could save from reducing water loss.⁶

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. This is the site’s view, drawn from the loss and supply figures above.

Standing references for this sector.

• 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 the first, second and third addenda (2026). 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