In Kenya, community run small-scale water systems play a critical role in supplying and improving access to water services in peri-urban and rural areas. This is largely because municipally-owned water services providers currently supply only 25 per cent of the country's population and 39 per cent of the population within their service areas. Historically, under a centralized institutional structure, a large number of communities were tasked with managing and recovering the operating costs of small piped water supply systems installed by government. The importance of these community providers has been recognized in recent reforms of the sector. These provide for a legal and regulatory framework for community based organizations to engage in water service provision outside major towns and cities. However, a host of problems complicate efforts to support these community organizations to become reliable service providers, including their limited management capacity, low operating revenues and lack of access to finance. Efforts to license and regulate the operations of community water projects have been hampered by the slow implementation of policies aimed at decentralizing water service delivery to communities in areas not covered by municipal water services providers. In spite of considerable liquidity within the Kenyan financial sector, domestic banks do not typically finance investments in water infrastructure because of the long term nature of infrastructure finance and the perceived lack of creditworthiness of rural and peri-urban small scale water providers. Efforts to license and regulate the operations of community water projects (CWPs) have been hampered by the slow implementation of policies aimed at decentralizing water service delivery to communities in areas not covered by municipal water services providers. With the considerable public financial resources available in the water sector, the size of the market for a loan linked product is likely to be limited over the medium term. However, public funds are not sufficient to build the infrastructure required to effectively meet the demand for water services: hence the increasing focus on cost recovery tariffs and the considerable initiatives underway to access supplementary financial resources from the private sector.