Source: IRC Ghana 

This kind of flag planting is not limited to virtual maps; we see them also in the real World. We have all seen the signboards when entering a village with a text like “the water system in this village has been developed by [fill in name of donor]” , handpumps with a little metal tag with the flag of the donor country that financed it, or water committees all with the same t-shirt with in big letters [fill in name of the project that helped setting up the committee]. Not only external donors do this. It is also common to see commemoration plates at the storage tank with a text like “this water system has been developed under the administration of [fill in name of the President or mayor who was in power then].

Whereas I can understand that donors like to get some recognition and visibility for the money they contributed, it all becomes quite embarrassing when that pump is broken, or when the toilet block with the big signboard is the filthiest place in town. Not something any donor, or government, would like to have its name associated with. More problematic even is that this kind of flag flying may give the wrong message that the pump or water system was some kind of gift and that it belongs to the donor. How often does one hear references to “the EU pump”, “the mayor’s water system” or “the UNICEF toilets”? In spite of all efforts to provide communities with ownership – hopefully in the legal sense of the word and not just “the sense of ownership”- the kind of flag flying just reinforces the wrong message that it is the funder’s asset. This may in fact contribute to the break-down of pumps. I have seen many communities that are hesitating to repair the water system, as they are afraid to touch the donor’s pump or the Government’s storage tank. Or, they may actually sit and wait for the donor to come back, expecting that the donor would do the repair or replacement of their water system.

It made me think on how this type of visibility is being done in my own country. And there it is always the service provider’s name and logo that is on all the assets. The treatment plant in the dunes not far from my apartment in the Hague has the name of the utility that operates it, even though it may not have covered all the investments into it. I don’t know the details of that treatment plant, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the initial investment was partially done with national or municipal funds. There is no sign to be seen that says “this treatment plant was developed under the administration of Mayor X or Prime-Minister Y”.

And this is how it should be. I think flag flying could be done in a positive way that actually gives the message that was should be a given, and not a gift. What if the signpost at the start of the village would read “the water service in this village is provided by [fill in the name of the community-based service provider]”? What if the metal plate on the handpump would have the name of the water committee that maintains it, and not of the donor that paid for its installation? What if the commemoration plate at the storage tank would have the contact details of the municipality or district office that the community can go to for support or questions, rather than the name of the mayor who oversee the construction of the tank? I think that would do much more to create at least sense of ownership among the community, more pride among the water committee, and provide the real important information to the users, namely the details of its service provider and not of its infrastructure developer.

My hypothesis is that water systems that would have such kind of visibility perform better than the ones that provide visibility to the infrastructure developer – maybe something to test in our Triple-S research? Donors and politicians don’t need to worry: there is much more pride in saying that the systems that were developed under your administration or with your money are performing well, than in having your name or logo put on a broken handpump or leaking tank.

What is it that IADB’s Max Valasquez Matute in Honduras finds ‘only a bit short of a miracle’?  The decision by seven INGOs to align their programming in Honduras in support of an Everyone Forever movement aimed at delivering full coverage in sustainable rural water, sanitation and hygiene services.

Whether there was divine intervention or not, the meeting we attended on the 24 May between the assembled board members of the Millennium Water Alliance and the Mesa de Cooperantes (the donor coordination platform) of the Honduran WASH sector was pretty unusual – and very exciting.

The MWA represents most of the biggest North American INGOs, and as such a huge combined total of WASH sector activity.  We conservatively estimated that their aggregate contribution to Honduras’s WASH sector in the last five years was more than 20 million $US.  Not only do Catholic Relief Services, CARE, IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre, Living Water International, Water.org, Water For People, World Vision, contribute a lot of money (possibly as much as 25% of total sector financing), but they are present in a large portion of the country (as shown in the map) and are there for the long term.  Imagine then, how potent they could be as a force for positive change if they were to align their programme to a common set of principles and operating practices.  This is what is being tried in Honduras under the “Everyone Forever” banner.

The principles to which the MWA members are aligning in Honduras are part of  a unique framework that more and more WASH sector actors see as a way to achieve faster progress and greater sustainability. The Everyone Forever approach includes:

• taking the whole municipality and not just a community or village within it as the principal unit for intervention
• working to support local governments – mayors – to commit to a vision (and develop realistic planning) to ensure that every person, every school, every clinic within that municipality has access to permanent WASH services
• ensuring that Everyone pays and contributes – supporting the municipality to identify financing to achieve the vision, and supporting them to work the finances through their system – to iron out bottlenecks (making municipalities credit worthy); and also generate community level contributions through tariffs;
• modeling what it takes to reach the last to be served (in the Honduran context the most dispersed rural communities);
• assessing and addressing Forever challenges from the beginning including long-term finance for major repairs and system replacement; sustainable sanitation; water resource management and protection; monitoring, evaluation, and learning, and institutional strengthening;
• embedding all of the municipality level work deeply into national structures and thus creating a bottom up (mayor to mayor) and top down movement to replicate and scale what has been achieved in the municipalities.

At the heart of EF is a deep commitment to putting municipalities at the heart of service delivery, to support them, to champion them and to building on the energy this creates to achieve a movement that leads to full coverage.

The beauty of the EF approach is that it starts with a vision – not a set of pre-prescribed ‘solutions’ – and an approach to working that is based on principles and an openness and willingness to learn.  To support this learning and to ensure coordination and embedding at the national level, the MWA members are supporting the inception of an “EF hub” in Honduras.  This hub will aim to coordinate activities across the movement – ensuring alignment and learning between MWA members and reaching out and linking to other networks and actors – such as the Mesa de Cooperantes or the national water rural water network (RAS-HON).

This is the start. There’s a lot to do and a lot to learn along the way.  Aligning the programmes of seven INGOs across – initially – 12 to 20 EF municipalities will take a lot of working out.  However, as Paul Hicks of Catholic Relief Services said during the meeting, Honduras has what is probably the most vibrant WASH sector of the region and some of the strongest and most empowered municipalities.  We’re hugely excited about the potential that the MWA EF programme has to build on this energy and enthusiasm to achieve a transformation in how lasting water, sanitation and hygiene are brought to all Hondurans.  A real miracle!

Back in June and July of 2012, Triple-S underwent a mid-term assessment (MTA) by an excellent team led by Dr. Ben Ramalingam. The MTA was a hugely useful exercise, allowing the Triple-S team and our partners to take some time out from our day to day work to reflect on how we were doing. The MTA team held up a mirror to us as a project and process – in much the same way that Triple-S seeks to hold up a mirror to the rural water sector – allowing us to have a long hard look at ourselves.

We saw much that we liked. Real progress in getting the issue of sustainability, service delivery and learning on the national agendas in Ghana and Uganda, as well as internationally. Appreciation and respect for what the initiative is doing from friends and partners. At the same time, of course, it showed us things that challenged us. A tendency to stay focussed on the problem (of poor service delivery), and a lack of clarity as to suggested solutions. Similarly messaging that was at times simplistic and that did not differentiate sufficiently between audiences who were already fellow travellers on the journey to sustainable service delivery – and those who were only just starting or still needed to be convinced.

In the months following the MTA process and formal delivery of the report last November, the Triple-S team has been involved in an intensive process of recalibration and replanning – to build on what we liked, and to try to improve what we liked less. A first version of this recalibration is set out in this document which was finalised in January. At the centre of it is a pivoting of attention towards modelling solutions – in the form of a set of experiments that span the range from working out how mobile data can lead to improved technical support through entirely new structures for providing support to service providers to improved sector guidelines and policy. We are also focussing strongly on our overall approach to catalysing and supporting whole system change – working on systematising and deepening our understanding of how a whole sector can be supported to work in different and more effective ways. The thinking behind this is set out in our recently published theory of change document.

Making these documents public, particularly the MTA report and replanning document is long overdue, however we hope that they will be still be of interest. We are always delighted to get feedback – either publicly in the comments pages or privately. We’d also like to take the opportunity to thank once more the MTA team themselves, as well as sector colleagues and friends who took the time to share their opinions during the MTA and to contribute to the subsequent recalibration work.

In May during our annual review meeting we will be putting the spotlight on our experiments – and will share updates of progress and challenges.

Over the past 10 days, I have been doing data collection for a study report on the experiences of Water For People with its Everyone, Forever programme on Sagar and in Patharpratima, another block spread out over several smaller islands of the Sundarban region

The results show that these are real islands of success. Some 6 years ago, the coverage in water and sanitation in both blocks was around 40-50%. Now, coverage stands at 90-95% – depending a bit on which statistics you use. A mapping exercise using FLOW showed that there are enough functional water points (typically deep tubewells with a handpump) to cover the entire population. But there is widespread agreement that this fails to account for the distance people have to walk. Taking that into account there are several pockets of population that are not adequately covered. Likewise, several Gram Panchayats (lowest unit of government, akin to a municipality or county), have been declared Open Defecation Free in the past years, but since then several new families have come up who haven’t built toilets.

Still, it is a great achievement to have such an increase in access. So how was this achieved? First and foremost, this is due to substantial investments by the different levels of government. It has subsidies available for sanitation slabs and materials for families below the poverty line and other household categories, such as female-headed households. Through active promotion and awareness campaigns, families have been encouraged to use the subsidy to buy the slabs and invest some of their own money in digging pits and building simple superstructures (often just plastic and bamboo). Likewise there have been big investments by government in putting in new tubewells and rehabilitation of existing ones. Water For People – working mainly through local NGOs – has been joining government’s efforts, realizing that the financial contribution an NGO of its size and nature can make are always relatively modest compared to government investments. It has done so by pooling and complementing funds with local government. For example, in water, it has been pooling its own funds with those of government on a cost sharing basis (initially something like 80-20%, but now closer to 50-50%). In sanitation, it has taken a complementary approach, reaching out to people ineligible for the subsidy (because they are just above the poverty line), and providing them with interest-free loans, so they could also invest in their own toilets. In fact, it was found that many families who did get the government subsidy, also took out an interest-free loan to top-up the subsidy, so they could invest in a better superstructure. All in all, this has meant that WFP has contributed to about 10 to 15 percentage-point increase in coverage in water and sanitation.

Although this is greatly appreciated by the authorities and communities alike, this is not where they see the added value of WFP. Sooner or later, government could have reached these communities on its own account as well. The interviewed stakeholders see the real added value in the ideas and innovations that WFP has brought to tackle the issue of Forever, or the sustainability of the services being installed.

When the programme started downtime of water points was often several months. The Gram Panchayats, as the de facto service providers, often spent lots of time looking for mechanics or contractors to carry out repairs. Communities had little trust in the Gram Panchayats doing quick repairs. A first approach to improve the situation was the establishment and training of a network of handpump mechanics, called Jalabandhus. These Jalabandhus are private entrepreneurs who can be contracted by anyone for repairs. Some of the ones that were initially trained have since then left, and new ones have come up. There is often quite a bit of competition between them, and some of the best and most active ones have taken a chunk of market share of the ones that don’t perform so well. As a result though, there are now 1 or 2 Jalabandhus in each Gram Panchayat area. When a pump breaks down, the community can directly call the Jalabandhu. But the first question the Jalabandhu will ask is “who will pay?”. If the community has the money to cover his remuneration and materials, he will do the repair within 1 or 2 days. If the repair is bigger, the Gram Panchayat can also pay, but then it takes a bit longer to have the repair done, as the Jalabandhu will first assess how big the repair will be, provide a quotation to the Gram Panchayat and then wait for the order from the Gram Panchayat to do the repair and guarantee the payment. This may take 4-5 days.

In addition to the Jalabandus, WFP has been setting up water committees at all water points where they intervened (new ones or rehabilitations). These are responsible for minor repairs and preventive maintenance, such as greasing. They often also collect a basic tariff to cover the costs of the Jalabandhu, as indeed many communities prefer to pay directly and have the water point repaired within a day, instead of having the costs covered by the Gram Panchayat but having to be without water for 5 days. Unfortunately, the water committees are not fully institutionalized yet. The water points where WFP didn’t intervene don’t have such arrangements, though they may have ad hoc arrangements that work similarly. Nor is there monitoring or support by the Gram Panchayat over the water committees. Current efforts are thus on the way to institutionalize these water committees a bit more. Some Gram Panchayats have started issuing orders that all water points need to have a water committee, or have stated that from now onwards, all minor repairs (e.g. below Rs 1000 or Rs 2000 – 20 to 40 US$) are to be covered by the community directly and cannot be paid for by the Gram Panchayat.

To the outsider, these arrangements of handpump mechanics and water committees may not come across revolutionary new ways of addressing the sustainability of rural water supply. In fact, they form part of the standard package in many rural water programmes. However, in a context where local government has been a de facto – but not well-performing – service provider, they do form an important change towards more sustainability. More importantly, the combination of these local arrangements with the relatively large amounts of funding that government provides may in fact prove to be the right mix. Where water committees and handpump mechanics have often failed is where there was no support from local government. And even though there will surely be big challenges ahead in addressing sustainability of WASH on these islands, still this programme has shown how NGO investments and innovations can be leveraged through government investment programmes and thereby moving from islands of success to reaching Everyone, Forever.

The most recent Global Water Challenge (GWC) webinar hosted at www.sustainablewash.org gave another useful opportunity to highlight the findings of the Qualitative Document Analysis (QDA) policy and practice research that has been disseminating during this (slightly cold) first part of 2013. Adding to the ‘reality content’ of those findings were two great presenters, Mike Kang of Engineers without Boarders Canada and Sanjay Bhatngar of WaterHealth International who gave some very good examples of how they see the life-cycle cost approach (LCCA) and asset management approach in their everyday working lives, with discussion chaired by Catarina Fonseca of WASH Cost.

Two very interesting trends were revealed by the audience polls undertaken during the webinar – that the percentage of participants who claimed to use LCCA and asset management approaches was much higher than the QDA results suggested, averaging over 50% in both instances. This is perhaps an indication of the improvements we may see in the second round of the QDA scheduled for 2014, but it also illustrates another possibility that was brought into focus by a question towards the end of the webinar concerning the monitoring results – where we saw an improvement in practice over policy – an inversion of the typical ‘policy practice gap’. The question was simply, what do you think this means? On an immediate level, it just indicates that we saw more quality references to monitoring (especially for service levels) in practice documents than we did in the policy documents. Saying anything beyond this at this stage is more speculative.

It also points to a far more interesting possibility however – that we are thinking about policy strengths and weaknesses in the wrong way. Perhaps instead we should invert the findings and move beyond an instrumental understanding of policy that places policy first and practice second. From this perspective, a vague or badly defined policy becomes a potential opportunity that allows practitioners to adapt, modify and improve what they do without the ‘permission’ of policy specialists. A strong, well defined policy conversely becomes something we should be wary of, and with it the temptation to stop thinking and step back from the consequences of any action we undertake.

Some policies need to be followed of course, for good reason, and this isn’t a call for arbitrary rule breaking or cynical actions, more an appreciation of what’s possible when a policy is weak. Rather than hold out the hope of policy as being something that has all the answers, how about seeing it as just another form of language that can be used, interpreted and modified in multiple contexts? This seems closer to the reality of development policy in action and, crucially, real life. If policy is free to become just another form of language again, we should certainly not be constricted or bewitched by it at the very least. With the right thinking, practices can change now, especially where policy is weak.

Over the past year, there has been quite a bit of buzz in the WASH sector on the sustainability clause  that DGIS seeks to include in its contacts with implementers. The pros and cons of this have been widely debated . A key component of the clauses is to have sustainability checks as a way to verify whether sustainability criteria are being met. One of the sessions at the “Monitoring Sustainable WASH Service Delivery Symposium” focused on this kind of approaches, looking back at past experience and at the future outlook for them. Particular emphasis was given to the experiences of two bilateral donors who have been leading the way in this: USAID and DGIS, as well as their partners.

Two practical applications were presented of the sustainability check: by the UNICEF-led One Million Initiative programme in Mozambique and of the USAID-Rotary programme in the Dominican Republic, Ghana and the Philippines. Both followed a similar approach: scoring the probability of sustainability of WASH services developed in a particular programme. In this, not only the services themselves were scored, but also the enabling conditions at district and even national level. What was emphasized is that these are really audits of a sample of facilities and the districts where work was done, to see whether a programme actually delivers on sustainability. The results are in part used to provide accountability to the donor (DGIS and USAID respectively), but above all to trigger improvements in the programmes, there where weaknesses were identified. Also differences were identified between the countries. The main one is that in the Mozambique case, the programme was jointly carried out between UNICEF and the Government of Mozambique, so the Government fully owned the approach and had contributed to its development. In the case of the USAID-Rotary programme, it was more focused on WASH services developed by this NGO and government was not really involved. A common point of improvement for both checks is a better inclusion of equity aspects, as transpired in the discussions.

After these presentations, both USAID and DGIS explained how such check fit into their broader approach to sustainability. Heather Skilling highlighted that a new water and development strategy is under development in USAID, which provides a strong emphasis on sustainability. Concretely, it means a commitment of USAID to monitor the sustainability of their programmes, beyond the duration of the project life-time. They are planning to use sustainability checks – probably after a series of modifications and improvements – as a tool for this. Pim van der Male (DGIS) provided a number of drivers for the increased focus on sustainability of WASH programmes supported by DGIS. One of them is the IOB evaluation, which highlighted positive results in extending coverage but also showed sustainability problems. A second driver is a political one: Dutch parliament adopted a resolution to include more explicit sustainability criteria in future funding, and it is following the compliance with aid effectiveness principles carefully. In response to this evaluation and political discussions, DGIS has responded to Parliament that it is planning to include a sustainability clause in its future funding agreements, starting with multilateral programmes. Through such a clause, the implementing partner commits itself to monitor the sustainability of services for a period of 10 years after project completion and correct any failures that arise. Part of the clause is a sustainability compact, which describes the roles and responsibilities of the implementing partner, the partner government and others in ensuring sustainability. It thus provides the institutional framework for guaranteeing sustainability but also is a ways of assessing any sustainability risks. The actual checking of compliance with the clause would be done through a type of sustainability check, similar to what has been done in Mozambique – though possibly with alterations. The take-home message of this discussion was that a sustainability check needs to be seen in relation to the broader commitments to sustainability, such as through a clause or compact. And it is encouraging to see that USAID and DGIS, as two of the biggest bilateral donors in the WASH sector, show such a commitment and are willing to include such checks in their programmes.

Last week in Gammarth, Tunis the African Development Bank called a meeting, attended by about 160 sector experts and other government officials, to launch a new coordination mechanism for its flagship Rural Water Supply and  Sanitation Initiative, or RWSSI. It was an interesting couple of days and through the various presentations, discussions, working groups and questions from the floor, a number of both key opportunities and challenges – fault lines even – were exposed to me as a relatively neutral participant.

First a few words of background. The RWSSI was launched in 2003 as a common pan-African framework for resource mobilization and investment in the rural sub-sector. Since its launch the RWSSI has helped to contribute to increased access for significant numbers in this first eight years – 45 and 30 million respectively for water and sanitation; but treat these claims with a pinch of salt as they include all people with new first time access, regardless of funding within the RWSSI framework or not. Following an in-depth mid-term review in 2010/11 five problem areas were identified, including: inadequate investments; limited coordination at national and sub-national levels; weak coordination at regional level; lack of a forum for exchange of lessons and issues; and poor knowledge management. 

This meeting was then intended to address the issue of ‘regional’ coordination and in fact the invitation was to attend the launch of the ‘Regional Coordination Committee’ of the RWSSI.

What first struck me was the mix of participants. A strong showing from the Water and Sanitation Department of course. And for sure there was the usual set of rural WASH expert friends from Regional Member Countries (RMCs) and a very small number of representatives from non-RMCs (largely donor partner countries).  But also a good smattering of Ministry of Finance (MoF) staff from various countries; I shared a taxi to the venue with someone from the Moroccan MoF who interestingly had no prior knowledge of the RWSSI, let alone the intricacies of the proposed new coordinating body.

This was one of the first positive takeaways from my visit, in that one of the constant themes of the meeting – pressed home by both technical OWAS staff and others – is that it is primarily government spending and user tariffs that is going to bridge the financing gap. It was great to hear this positive message that African government’s can, and must, do more to invest both in capital infrastructure and most importantly to support long-term recurrent costs. It was also interesting to hear the declaration that there are now several African states, including Burkina Faso, Chad and Cote d’Ivoire now actively funding the RWSSI.

The very fact of the meeting illustrated another positive story for me – the OWAS recognising that it needs to do more to socialise the findings of the mid-term evaluation and to bring people into the process before simply landing any new coordinating mechanism on them. In discussions over coffee and in the corridors it is apparent that as with any other big, ambitious multi-country initiative, the good will and enthusiasm expressed in such meetings inevitably fades into the background when people return to their ministry day jobs. But by bringing this group together and listening to their concerns and priorities, the AfDB will have gone a long way towards building the foundations for better cooperation and buy in down the road.

During the meeting itself, there were quite a few questions and doubts expressed about the need for a new regional coordination committee and what the ‘region’ in its title actually refers to – Africa as a region? The five official sub-regions of the continent? The other big fault line is how this structure would relate to – or possibly even duplicate – existing structures and what its official mandate would be?

One of the strongest and loudest voices on this issue was from AMCOW in particular the concern to not set up any parallel or duplicative structures at a continental level. The (political) mandate of AMCOW and its primacy as the only legitimate sector body at regional, that is to say, pan-African, level was clearly delivered over and over again. At the same time, AMCOW also repeatedly underscored its commitment to the RWSSI. One example was in the area of monitoring where I presented some findings around monitoring from our work in Triple-S as one of the four working groups and ended up facilitating on the second day of deliberations. The AMCOW Executive Secretary was very emphatic in stating that we should not reinvent the wheel when trying to come up with standardised definitions and indicators of access and service and that AMCOW already has a framework on M&E. When we pressed on this issue it became apparent that this framework is actually still under development.

In the end – and with the hand of AMCOW on the small of the back I sensed – the Regional Coordination Committee title was hastily renamed as the RWSSI Coordination Committee and launched by the end of the meeting. As a footnote in the proceedings, what did this tell me? That just as with any complex initiative that has to link between institutional levels, between organisations with differing mandates and which relies on active participation, there will always be gaps between expectation and reality. The attempts to make a fit between a continental initiative and national priorities reminded me of the same discussions in the post JMP working groups – how can a global set of targets and indicators be relevant for such a range of national contexts?

In the end it’s all about communication and dialogue. Without this the OWAS will sit in Tunis and not be able to effectively work with RMC sectors on the critical challenges of the day. This meeting was another positive step in keeping these discussions going and working through the very real challenges as the delegates wind their way back to 54 African countries.

Just back from the WASH sustainability forum in Washington DC and as the dust settles, it is time to pick up on the blog I wrote in anticipation of the two days of discussion, reflection, and sharing. How did it all go? Did the earth move under our feet? Well, perhaps predictably the answer to that one is ‘no’ – very few one-off meetings or events are earth-shattering in that sense – but all in all, it was a good meeting and a good week.

My main take away message is an overwhelmingly positive one. From the meeting, it is clear that the focus of debate and stated intent continues to shift; and we are seeing signs of change in action too. There is a real momentum around sustainability in WASH and even though, as pointed out in the meeting, this can be a rather ‘mushy’ tagline, we are increasingly successful in breaking this down to its constituent parts and being specific about what ‘sustainbility’ really means in practice–the planning and delivering of indefinite water and sanitation services and monitoring these services over time (rather than just the hardware), of regulating and supporting service providers, of replacing assets over time. As Jae So, Manager of the Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) of the World Bank, summed up in her closing remarks, since the last forum in January 2011 collectively in the  sector ‘we’ve made huge strides over last few years to create common framework for talking about sustainable services’. It’s great to get this kind of recognition and endorsement from such a leading sector institution as WSP.

Despite some predictably unpredictable technical problems on the AV side, the WASH Sustainability forum event got out of the starting blocks with an inspiring address by José Louis Irigoyen of the World Bank, who as the meeting host, reinforced the concepts of investing not only in hardware but in the institutions that deliver a service, very much with government in the lead. In fact the event was topped and tailed by senior representatives of the World Bank and the Water and Sanitaiton Program, including the Bank’s Water Anchor, but it was a shame that more core Bank staff such as the Task Team Leaders could not be with us throughout the day to share their very significant experience and knowledge.

Overall we had a big, active and great group of people, at around 150 and representing some 80 organisations which meant that there were lots of points of view and a wide range of experience to share. I also noted that along with the old timers who had attended in 2010 and 2011 there were also quite a few new faces joining the discussion which was very encouraging.

One of the best parts of the day and a half programme – and a change from the previous events – was to have government from around the world in the room and front and centre in the debates and discussions. We had representatives from line ministries, local government and regulators from Honduras, Guinea, Bangladesh, Albania and Uganda bringing their very important perspectives to bear and also telling positive stories of how government provides leadership, vision and practical frameworks to work towards providing sustained levels of service to rural and peri-urban populations. I was particularly pleased to note how Commissioner Kabrizi’s work from the Rural Water Department of the Ministry of Water and Environment in Uganda was referenced as a shining example of good practice in Africa and one from which we could all learn. As a core partner of the Triple-S Uganda initiative, we know how much the government has done to create the enabling environment for service provision. And although the sector in Uganda still faces many challenges, there is no doubt that there has been a lot of success in establishing the approaches and frameworks that allow for tackling rural water services at scale and in a systemic way – one of the most impressive, also flagged as exemplary in the forum, is the national monitoring system and its eleven ‘golden indicators’.

Taking advantage of the time in Washington after the forum, I visited a number of key sector players along with Nico Terra (IRC Director) and Patrick Moriarty (head of International Programme and Director of the Triple-S project) to formally introduce IRC and to discuss potential plans for opening a US office or representation, which for the most part was met with a lot of enthusiasm. We had some very informative discussions with the (largely) new team at USAID and heard about their new Water Strategy which has been a long-time in the making, but is due to release very soon – I am hoping that some of the key building blocks of sustainable service delivery are enshrined in this document and that we see a move away from a focus on the notion that development aid in our sector can be counted on the basis of numbers of systems built or ‘people reached’.

We also had a very productive meeting with one of the World Bank’s focal points for their thematic group on rural WASH. She outlined some innovative work in Central America with regional governments supported by the Bank in the area of monitoring though a programme known as SIASAR.  The World Bank is a massive organisation and it is hard to get one, comprehensive overview of their actions in WASH. From these discussions it seems that there is still small, but significant funding in the Latin America and Caribbean region, but that rural water remains as a low/non-priority in other regional hubs and seems to have been more or less dropped from the Water Anchor, which is a great shame. Like USAID, the World Bank is also in the process of finalising a new vision document for water, which will set out their position vis-à-vis the sector for the next ten years. We were informed that one of the four pillars of this vision is to address areas of need with an explicitly pro-poor focus. Given that most of the un-served, and some of the poorest people in developing countries live in rural areas, let’s hope that this imbalance in the Bank’s lending portfolio will be addressed as part of that new water strategy.

Returning to my original challenge to sector organisations attending this forum, it is clear that this one event will not result in a complete change of course for any particular development partner. But from some of the conversations I was part of, and from some of the ones that I overheard, it does seem as though we achieved our objective of getting people to reflect and think through the issues and about how their work and investments relate to those of governments in the countries in which they operate. As I said at the outset, for some this is nothing new and is part of their bread and butter operations, but for others I hope it provided some new insights into respective roles and activities. Let’s see what the next twelve months brings and look for further signs of change.

Well, here we go again. Next week – 11^th and 12^th of March – there will be another gathering in Washington DC of a range of (primarily) US based Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) sector practitioners, experts, policy makers and funders to discuss the issue of the day: how to make services more sustainable? This is one in a number of such meetings, but this time we have managed to bring representation and voices from Southern governments to the table which will no doubt help to ground some of these discussions.

The question for me, not for the first time, is will this just be another talking shop with platitudes and nice words but little real change? And if it’s not to be, then what are the key messages people should be thinking about when they take time out from their day jobs to attend such a meeting?  As one of those responsible for organising and hosting these two days, preparing for this meeting has got me thinking long and hard about who does what and how these various actors relate to one another, to governments of Southern countries, and to the core business of getting sustainable WASH services to everyone.

Picking up on the theme of my last blog, I’m hoping that we’ll be able to encourage all those attending to really think about the nature of ‘development aid’ and how they and their organisations relate to broader processes of development of the national WASH sectors in the countries in which they operate.

There’s such a wide range of organisations all working under the broad umbrella of improving the WASH sector; first and foremost national governments in the South and users. Then we have the huge development banks, bi-and multi-lateral government aid orgnisations, through to the large International NGOs and foundations with a global reach to smaller (sometimes tiny) foundations,  NGOs, charities and private sector contractors.  And of course there’s the newer breed of charity which sees the free market as a solution in the form of patient capital.

These organisations and the people in them (including me) are driven by a range of incentives, from professional ambition, to religious or ideological interests to viewing the development or charity business as just that, another business.

However we see it, we all have a role to play in what we call aid – but which the public in many of our countries often calls ‘charity’.  Many of us are coming to Washington DC next week. But with so many players and so many angles to aid or charity in providing sustainable WASH services, what are the relative strengths of our different types of organisations and what should our roles be in this question of supporting sustainable WASH services?

Who supports what?

In the words of the great — and recently ‘re-discovered’ — Sixto Rodriguez, let’s take a look at the cold facts.  This should be easy, but as many of us know, facts and evidence are often relatively thin on the ground in our sector.  One stream of evidence that is instructive, and relatively easy to get a handle on, is finance: who is paying for what in WASH?

Firstly, as many of us may be aware, governments are the biggest funder (other than users themselves).  Data from a recent World Bank – AFD report from 2010 indicates that over one half of all (7.6 billion US$/year) expenditure for water and sanitation is financed through the public sector.  However, that is total expenditure on the whole sector.  Further analysis by the Public Services International Research Unit, looking just at capital expenditure (paying for new infrastructure) found that official development assistance (money from development banks, bi- and multi-lateral donors) is more significant than public spending (by about 15%).

So, governments pay for more of recurrent and donors for more of capital investment. And it is the recurrent costs that really matter here – for example, we know from recent WASHCost research findings that the recurrent costs for small scale, or ‘basic’ water supply systems, over a twenty-year life span are in the order of two to three times that of capital investment.

However, it’s important to understand that buried in these macro figures are important differences.  Most important of which, is that for low-income countries, the contribution of aid to capital investment is even greater — much greater in fact, about three times as much per year as the public sector. The top ten country donor contributors over a five year average period are shown in the graph below, using data from the OECD

These are figures for official development aid and are relatively easy to access.  Figures for spending by NGOs are much more difficult to find and can be confusing as a lot of bi-lateral aid can be sometimes channelled through NGOs and others.  OECD figures do not include funding from charitable foundations.

The USA-based WASHfunders.org collects  information about charitable foundations (grant-making institutions) in the USA and gives us an idea of the relative order of magnitude financing per year. The data from their research brief shows the following:

(Source: Foundation Funding for Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene, March 2012, Foundation Center)

This figure from WASHfunders.org shows relative financing with yellow bubbles representing bi- and multi-lateral funding, while the purple ones are foundation funding (relative size of the bubbles are not to scale in terms of funding levels)

What is the point being made by this muddle of different data and various references to financing? Of course, it’s often tricky at the best of times to get these figures right, to avoid double counting and follow the thread, especially as funding is channelled through different organisations such as INGOs or private sector companies – but there is no avoiding these order of magnitude differences. The irrefutable cold fact here is that it is national government and user tariffs that provide the lion’s share of financing over the long term, followed by the major lending banks and bi-laterals. Even non-OECD funding (China and the other BRICS) is relatively small for WASH, except in (resource) rich countries where there are obvious geo-political interests.

Even allowing for data collection errors and gaps in the information, it is clear that charitable foundations taken together represent a relatively insignificant level of investment, and certainly do not have the kind of mandate or leverage of some of the other players. The same would be true I am sure for Europe – we are talking tens, possibly a hundred million dollars per year at most as oppose to the billions invested by others.

Back to Washington D.C.

So coming back to thinking about what this means for the various groups that will attend the sustainability forum next week: what are the implications of this and what are the messages that I’ll be bringing with me? Big spending power doesn’t automatically equate to better interventions, but there are differences between what these actors can and can’t do in practice.

For the likes of the World Bank, other development banks and major bi- and multi-lateral donors to the WASH sector, I will be challenging them to use their unique positioning, official mandate and ‘big bucks’ to make a much stronger push for sector reform, institution building and a focus on the delivery of permanent services, particularly for rural areas. There have been a lot of valuable lessons from the urban sector around improving formal utility performance over the last two decades that can apply here.

It is time to be much bolder. Why should poor rural and peri-urban people have to live with shambolic and sub-standard services?  Several times in the last few years my colleagues from the Triple-S initiative and I have gone to argue this case at the World Bank, the African Development Bank and other centres of sector influence.  And of course, the people we meet there, being good sector professionals, recognise the problem well. However, some – but by no means all – simply shrug their shoulders saying: ‘well, it’s our government clients who ask for these type of loans for the rural sector and at the end of the day, we don’t really have any power beyond the end of the loan agreement period’.  In essence, justifying or explaining lending programmes that are still based on the ‘build it, run away and hope’ model. This is akin to a retail bank manager agreeing over and over again to a loan for someone with a half-baked business plan, that he knows won’t work; this would not be tolerated on the high street (main street that is), so why for rural water and sanitation?

The Banks and the major bi-lateral donors have a seat at the sector high table, they have influence and leverage over governments and sector change processes; they are core partners and share a mutual accountability with them. So the ask here is to push harder on the issues that we know matter most such as sound maintenance regimes, proper asset management, funding for long-term capital maintenance and replacement;  and to push governments to improve their own monitoring and regulation. We know that a number of these big players are already working on these issues, but they must do more to improve investments in the sector, particularly for the rural sub-sector.

For the smaller foundations and NGOs attending the forum, it is time to reconsider. They need to ask themselves whether their work as currently implemented is sustainable, or indeed taking place at a scale to make a difference?  What happens when the systems they’ve created fall into disrepair?    What are the implications of working directly with communities and by-passing local governments who are struggling and under-resourced  – and that are often undermined by the ‘gifts’ that suddenly appear with entirely different tariff schedules, management arrangements and so on?  Acknowledging the admirable desire to help, and the right of people to spend their money as they see fit, I will at least be lobbying these organisations to be more aware of other ongoing efforts in the areas where they intervene – especially of sovereign governments – and to align themselves as best they can with these.

The larger international NGOs should, in turn, also take a long hard look at themselves and where they sit in this equation. Unless the country in question really is a failed state or has completely ineffective government, should they really be laying a role in direct provision of services?  Or should they rather be working with mandated service providers to work through problems, find innovative solutions, and test models that work?

All of us should think ahead and look to the future. As Robert Picciotto (King’s College, and former Director General, Evaluation, World Bank) implies in his excellent talk on the country led paradox to M&E: many of us are missing the point – it is ultimately public sector investments and improved public administration systems that will make the difference for support to and regulation of services such as water and sanitation, especially at the level of decentralised or local government. As low-income countries grow economically and develop, this will increasingly be the case.

So for all of us, but especially NGOs, we need to re-evaluate our roles, particularly our relations to government (local and national).  My feeling is that the best approach in the medium term will be to stop building stuff as a direct service provider and rather, where we continue to build at all, to do so as an innovator and builder of capacity. Another excellent way to influence the WASH sector of the future is to support emergent civil society watchdogs and pressure groups who can monitor and advocate to government from the outside, as well as to strengthen government itself (through parliamentary audit or oversight groups for example). A case in point is the work of WASH Advocates, an organisation that advocates towards the US government and increasingly is seeking to raise the capacity of similar advocacy groups in developing countries too.

Another alternative role for the smaller foundations and NGOs – and one that we are actively seeking to fill ourselves through our work in Triple-S – is to provide the space and conditions for innovation and learning, but in cooperation with government and other sector stakeholders by creating in-country  ‘innovation labs’. These could focus on rigorous testing of new innovations and solutions, from the adoption of technology and telemetry, to novel financing instruments such as insurance schemes for financing of capital replacement.

I am sure we will have plenty of good debates and discussions next week – and change never happens on the basis of just one meeting – but I do hope those attending will think hard about what they are doing, why they do it and what they can do differently to make sustainable water and sanitation services a reality in the countries that need it most.

Harold Lockwood

Two years ago, a new WASH policy was formulated in Honduras. This set the date for achieving universal coverage was set to the year 2038, in line with the overall development policy framework of the Government of Honduras. At the time, that looked ridiculously far away for me, particularly realizing that the coverage in water supply already stood at 87%, according to JMP figures (79% in rural areas and 95% in urban areas) (coincidentally these are almost the same as the averages of the World as a whole, making Honduras a kind of bellwether country for the World’s trends in access to WASH). Taking these figures at face value, and assuming that results from the past are at least indicative for the future, a linear extrapolation of past coverage growth rates of 3 percentage point per five years would yield achieving universal coverage in about 2030, so a bit ahead of 2038.

Table 1: Water supply coverage in Honduras according to the Joint Monitoring Programme

However, there may be various reasons for why the trajectory is not linear:

• As coverage goes up, a bigger part of public investments into water needs to go into maintaining existing assets, leaving less funds available for increasing access to the one uncovered. Or failure to do so, leads to more and more existing service breaking down more rapidly than new ones are being built
• The per capita costs of infrastructure development of the ones still to cover is likely to be higher for the ones unserved as they typically live in more remote and difficult to access areas, where conventional technology options are not possible
• The ones who already have access may have legitimate demands for higher levels of service, e.g. more water or of better quality. Public investments are likely to respond to these demands, possibly at the expense of the extending coverage to the unserved
• The combination of these factors may lead to what has been called the danger zone, where growth in coverage gradually reduces or stagnates and reaches universal coverage asymptotically.

Luckily, the danger zone does not necessarily have to be the so dangerous. Other factors may actually lead to a faster growth in access. For example, better support to self-supply initiatives by individuals may actually increase the effectiveness of household investments, and thereby actually increase total funds that go into the sector.

Whether indeed one gets stuck into the danger zone; or, whether these can be overcome at a meaningful scale depends a lot on which approaches are followed when making investments in rural water.

One of the approaches that has exited me over the past years, is the Everyone, Forever approach by Water For People. They concentrate their efforts in a limited number of municipalities and continue working until everyone is covered. Everyone? Yes, everyone. Until the proverbial last house on top of the mountain has improved access. As WFP’s CEO Ned Breslin says, even if the financial mathematics do not look good, this can be achieved, as so nicely illustrated by examples in Bolivia. And in Honduras, the mathematics didn’t even look bad: universal coverage in the municipality of Chinda was reached at unit costs that are well in line with the ones used by the government.

The question of course, is whether reaching everyone one municipality after the another goes fast enough to speed up the achievement of universal coverage and helps avoiding the danger zone. Water For People works in 3 municipalities in Honduras. What about the other 296? Can government – or other NGOs – adopt a similar approach in these other ones?

A part of our Life-Cycle Cost Analysis in Honduras, we reviewed 106 of the about 200 rural water supply systems developed over the last team years by FHIS, the main government agency investing in rural water. And the results cast some doubt on the potential to follow a similar approach. These 200 water systems are not the only ones in which the government has invested but represent a major part, and this would thus be equivalent to less than 1 system per municipality. The 106 systems in our sample were spread out over 69 municipalities. This large spread is explained by the fact that government has the social responsibility to invest throughout the national territory, often responding to demands from local authorities. It cannot just prioritize one municipality,  cover that fully and move to the next one.

Also some of the danger zone factors were found. Of the 106 systems in our sample, only about half were completely new systems or extensions, so effectively investments in extension of coverage. The other half were in fact rehabilitations of existing systems, taking about one third of the total investments made in the period under review.

Another danger zone factor refers to the relation between population size and unit costs. The table below shows average per capita costs of different types of interventions for different types of settlements. As can be seen the per capita costs in the smallest type of settlements are by far highest for all types of settlements. This doesn’t bode well for the settlements still to be covered, many of which are likely to fall into the “dispersed rural” category.

Table 2: Average per capita costs of rural water investments made by FHIS

Although these first findings may look discouraging, they have already sparked useful reflections. For example, some of the recent work by FHIS has tried to focus more on a smaller number of municipalities, so as to reduce overhead costs. Discussions are going on alternative approaches to cover people in dispersed rural settlements, thereby getting out of the unfavourable maths, as in the case of WFP’s work in Bolivia. Finally, these kinds of unit costs figures will be able to inform financial planning frameworks. With that we can assess whether by 2030 there will be improved access for everyone. And hopefully it can be answered with a wholehearted “yes, everyone!”

Recently I have been on a continent-hopping tour through a different range of meetings and events, from which I have seen a pattern emerging, or at least a series of questions in my own mind, as I carry out my work in the WASH sector at an international level.

My first engagement was in Africa in early October to facilitate a three-day learning convening on behalf of a major foundation, which supports WASH investments. This brought together a range of partners, mainly international NGOs, to share experiences about learning and WASH issues. It was noteworthy that the organisers made an explicit effort to reach out to government, inviting five different senior country representatives to the meeting. The requirement to work more closely with government in terms of better understanding policy, norms and guidelines was a common theme in the convening and a mantra that was repeated over and over again during the course of the three days. My sense is that this is new – that we were not seeing this kind of call for alignment, certainly not ten years ago, and maybe not even five.

The second major event I attended was a three day South Asia regional meeting in Kathmandu in the middle of October organised by the World Bank (with financial support from AusAID), entitled ‘Rural Water Supply and Sanitation: towards long-term sustainability’. This was a meeting dominated by the public sector – big government, from (mostly) big countries – showcasing what can be done at scale. And because this is Asia some of the scale is truly impressive – programmes affecting millions of rural lives – with innovation and real impact. And most importantly in my view, because it is government taking the lead in these innovations they are much more likely to ‘stick’ and to go to scale.

The third leg of my autumnal odyssey took me to Chapel Hill in North Carolina to the UNC Water and Health 2012 Conference for a gathering of a mixed group, but one dominated by the sector in the United States of America, with many NGOs and charities, small and large – and as may be expected a fair few academics and post-doctorate students about the place. Our numbers were depleted somewhat by the arrival of Super Storm Sandy, which also forced me to leave early. But from the few sessions I attended my overwhelming impression was that many in the audience – and on the podium for that matter – seemed to have a blind spot when it comes to developing countries governments. Instead the refrain I heard most often was of ‘our projects’ and ‘our reporting’ and ‘our beneficiaries’.    There seemed to be a general dismissal of the fact that developing country governments can and do function, albeit with major problems, constraints and issues around accountability and transparency.

Finally, a couple of weeks later, I was part of a team facilitating a training course to a group of largely public-sector officials from a range of countries on service delivery at the decentralised level. We had a lot of interesting discussions during the course of the week about the role of government, of leadership and ‘aid effectiveness’ at the local level. A comment by one of the officials from Uganda seemed to sum it up when he said ‘the NGOs come along (to Uganda), drill ten boreholes and then make a lot of fuss and noise’; his point being that compared to the thousands of boreholes being installed by government, what is done by ‘not government’ in this space is actually pretty limited and yet grabs a lot of the headlines.

Water charity – who’s it all for anyway?

So in the end what did I learn from all this traveling around, talking to and interacting with people from a very wide range of organisations and viewpoints?

My overall reflection is about the nature of ‘charity’ and who is it all really for in the end. A lot of people in the NGO sector quite rightly try and hold governments to account, both in the developing world and in the north. But when it comes to actually delivering services, a lot of the NGOs and charities that I have come across recently really seem to have a blind spot in their critique of government particularly in African countries. The assumption seems to be that governments there are either so inherently inefficient and/or corrupt (or both) so as to be incapable – or un-willing – to take steps to improve services for the poor. Whilst there are no doubts elements of this to be found – and so called ‘anti-developmental states’ do exist – this likely says more about the people espousing these views than about developing country polititics.

But I would go even further and posit that there is a fundamental difference in view about the role – and importance – of the state between those I meet in the USA and those in the UK and Europe and elsewhere. There are now hundreds of organisations working on WASH in developing countries in the USA and it seems to me that they are making – just as described by our Ugandan government colleague – a lot of ‘white noise’; filling up the twitter and blog-sphere with messages about often trivial (and at best unproven) interventions, whilst displacing the real focus of the debate.

To put this into perspective I think it is worth going back again and again to the history of our (rural) sectors and how they got to where they are. In the USA itself rural water supplies only came into existence with significant infusions of federal government grants, which began in the 1930s and continued in the post-World War II era with infrastructure investment. This was significantly complemented in the 1960s and 1970s with funding for technical assistance and research. Even today it is estimated that user tariffs in small and very small size systems (essentially rural communities) only cover less than 50% of all recurrent costs, with the rest being made up from a mixture of state and federal budget transfer mechanisms, debt forgiveness and a small proportion of private loans. In the end, this is money from taxation that gets recycled and re-distributed and not development aid transfers, and it only works because people earn enough to be taxed in the USA and the tax system works (relatively well) and that there is political will to recycle money to these kind of communities.

Of course we don’t live in a black and white world and it is certainly not a case of ‘all government good – all non-government bad’.  Certainly it is not a case of all USA NGOs bad either – there are plenty such organisations from Europe who also work in this way. But what is clear for me is that there must be an absolutely central role for government in the provision of WASH in setting out the vision, the policy frameworks and the general ‘rules of the game’ and very much supporting the involvement of domestic private sector and private capital. I am not arguing that NGOs and charities should all shut-up shop and leave, but I do think that there should be a serious debate about what their role is and how they interact with government in a way which can support its development and capacity, rather than actively displace it with endless cycles of relatively miniscule scale interventions. Non-governmental organisations and charities have an important role to hold government to account, innovate and to support improvements in local government capacities especially.  But other than in the extreme emergency situations, their role as providers of primary services has little legitimacy, less scalability and almost no sustainability in the long run.

Maybe it is because I am essentially a European social welfarist at heart, but I believe passionately that we should do more to support government – at all levels – in the developing world to do their job better and put less emphasis on the squeaky wheels of non-government organisations who repeatedly rush in to save the day.

Vivienda minister Germán Vargas Lleras and Bucaramanga state water utility (AMB) general manager Ludwig Stünkel García at a public event. Photo: Julián Sabogal. MVCT

The Acueducto Metropolitano de Bucaramanga (AMB) is now the 5th certified public water utility sanctioned by the Colombian government to approve water and sanitation projects.

In a press release the  housing, cities and land ministry (MVCT) said new legislation approved in 2012 had made this delegation of powers to municipal water utilities possible. The ministry said this cuts red tape so that projects can be approved faster.

Previous certified public water utilities were Aguas de Cartagena, Empopasto, Aguas de Manizales and Empresas Públicas de Armenia.

Related websites:

• MVCT - Viceministerio de Agua y Saneamiento
• IRC/Triple-S – Water services that last – Colombia overview

Source: MVCT [in Spanish], 06 Dec 2012 ; BNamericas.com / WaterWorld.com, 06 Dec 2012

When Alice stepped through the mirroring water surface into waterland, the first creature she came across was a rabbit, wearing a UN-blue jacket, looking frantically at its watch.

“It is nearly time. Only three more years to go till 2015. So little time left. We won’t make it. We must hurry up.”, it mumbled to itself.

“Hey Mr. Rabbit”, said Alice, “what is all the hurry about? What must be done before 2015?”.

“Don’t you know? There is an MDG target to meet. Two in fact. Or actually one, as we have already met one. That is, everyone says we met it. But we don’t actually know”.

“How can you not know it, if you just said that you met the target?”.

“It is simple”, the blue-vested rabbit responded, “we measure who has a tap or a pump, but we don’t measure whether the tap works, or whether any water comes out, let alone whether it is drinkable. Through such a measure we can always say that we met the MDG and also say we don’t know. Easy, isn’t it?”

“And what about the other target?”, Alice asked. “

That is why I am in a hurry. There is no way we will meet that target, so, we must do all we can to meet it”.

“I am confused now; are you going to meet the target if you put in more effort, or wouldn’t that help anyway?”.

“The only thing that is more challenging than a moving target, is fixing a target and then giving the responsibility to someone else”.

“What do you mean, Mr. Rabbbit?”.

“Come, let me show you at the poo-ing field”.

Alice and Mr Rabbit walked to a smelly patch of grass, full of poo. In the middle stood the throne of the Queen of Hearts and Minds. A man and a woman kneeled in front of the throne.

“You have been found defecating in the open. Hereby I name and shame you, as perpetrators of the first rule, issued by me, the Queen of Hearts and Minds: thou shall not defecate in the open. Off with their heads!”

“What?!”, Alice shouted, “will they be beheaded for this?”.

“Don’t worry”, the rabbit with the blue vest answered, “the Queen speaks in metaphors. But they will be forced to build their own toilet. By naming and shaming them, the people will want to have a  toilet, know everything about fecal-oral contamination routes and thus use the toilets happily ever after. Let’s have a look at them”.

They walked to the edge of the field, where a line of make-shift toilets was being built. A foul smell came from them.

“Brrr, I wouldn’t want to use one of these toilets. They are smelly, and one could easily fall into the pit. Why are they so ramshackle?, Mr. Rabbit?”

“That is obvious. These people were too poor to be able to afford a toilet. That is why they poo-ed in the field. Now, they are still too poor to afford a toilet, so they build a ramshackle one. But don’t worry that someone will fall into the pit. Once the Queen moves her court to the next poo-ing field, they will go back and use the poo-ing field.”

“But, then, you will never be able to reach your target?”

“Clever girl. And that is why I am in a hurry to still meet the target. I need to go now. I still need to drill 10576 boreholes, re-build 75324 water systems, reach 756 million beneficiaries, and….”

Alice didn’t hear the last words of the rabbit, as it hopped away. Walking further through waterland, she bumped into a U-shaped meeting table.

“I am the Mad Chatter”, the main said who was making the table, “who are you?”.

“I am Alice”.

“ALICE? You mean the Agricultural Land-use and Integrated Centre of Excellence? Or are you the Association for Livelihoods and Irrigation for Community Empowerment?”

“No, I am just Alice”.

“Odd. Oh, it is Tea Time. You want some tea? Or, you prefer a bottle of water?”

“A bottle of water? I thought I was in waterland. Why do you have bottles of water on your meeting table, and not nice fresh tap water?”

“The taps are not working. And even if they were working, I wouldn’t trust the quality of the water”, the Mad Chatter responded. “Nobody here drinks the water he produces”. “I have a riddle for you, Alice. Why is water pump like a writing desk?”

“I don’t know”, Alice responded.

“Because both stand still in time”

“What do you mean? Why does the water pump stand still? Is that, why the taps are not working”.

“Let me explain. It is a long story. One day the Queen of Hearts and Minds ordered that everyone needed to pay for the pumps in waterland to work, 10 Shillings per person. I stood up to her and told her it was madness and that we would only pay 5 Shillings per person. She agreed. We all paid our 5 Shillings and the pumps worked fine. Exactly after 5 years, all pumps broke down. But there was no money to repair them. The Queen ordered time to stand still at that moment, as our punishment for not wanting to pay. The advantage is that it is now always Tea Time. The disadvantage is that we don’t have water to make tea. Can I offer you a bottle of water?”

“Why don’t you then pay for the repair yourselves?”

“Oh, we will just wait for someone to come by and repair it”

“But, if nobody comes by?”

“Then we just drink water from a bottle”

“Isn’t that more expensive? This doesn’t sound sustainable”

“You ask too many questions. Do you know what is sustainable?”

“Uhm, when water comes out of the tap all the time…”, Alice answered.

“Wrong!!!! Sustainable is when the water service is gender-balanced, climate-change-proof, strategically-developed, with bottom-up-top-down participation, in a clearly articulated action-based framework, with multiple-use life-cycle costs considering equitable disadvantaged groups with a sniff of water quality. And of course it is based on principles of integrated resources planning, user payments for low-costs appropriate technology design and institutional embedding of post-construction support and any other building block you can think of”.

Slightly intimidated by the Mad Chatter’s answer, Alice asked: “But, isn’t it more important that eventually water comes from the tap”

“Nooooo. We have discussed this over a long time. In fact, I was busy making the meeting table for the next meeting of the International Standing Committee to Discuss the Final Definite Definition of Sustainability of Water Supplies (and Sanitation) (and Hygiene). We will once again review the definition. You are distracting me with your smart questions”.

“Don’t listen to him. He is just a Mad Chatter” Alice heard in her ear.

“Who are you? I don’t see you”.

“Look up here, in the tree”, she heard again.

Then Alice saw it. It looked as if an organogram was hanging in the three.

“I am an Isomorphic Mimicry”.

When Alice came closer to the look at the Isomorphic Mimicry, the organogram disappeared, and only empty boxes were left, dangling from the tree.

“I have never seen or heard of an Isomorphic Mimicry”, Alice said. “What do you do in waterland?”

“I don’t actually exist”, the Isomorphic Mimicry answered. I exist in the mind of people. Here in waterland, the Queen draws organograms of water committees, district water offices, municipal water planning technicians and regulators. But actually, she, nor her assistants, ever bothered to equip any of these bodies. So, the water committee exists in the organogram, but when you go and look nobody is there. The municipal water planning technician was hired, but never paid his salary, so he left.”

“That must be a sad existence, not to exist”.

“To the contrary”, the Isomorphic Mimicry, answered. “I receive full attention all the time. The Queen and her assistants always talk about me, as if I exist. Sometimes, they even change me. Last week they drew a new arrow between the municipal water planning technician and the water committee, so the non-existent municipal water planning technician can be accountable to the non-existent water committee. A few days later, they turned the arrow around so the non-existent water committee would be accountable to the non-existent municipal water planning technician.”

“But, then are you not a fantasy?”

“Listen, Alice. Waterland is built on myths and fantasies. You have just experienced some of them: the run-away targets, the first rule of the Queen of Hearts and Minds and the sustainability chatter. As Isomorphic Mimicry, I am but one of them, so don’t blame me. There is nothing wrong with fantasies, when they are dreams about an ideal you can achieve. But don’t believe that you have achieved your dream when reality shows you something different. That would be the wrong kind of fantasy, that wouldn’t help waterland. So, wake up and separate your dreams from fantasy.”

The End.

The result of this comparison, using data from the e-discussion, as well as from other sources, is presented in the table below. To make the figures more comparable I took the original data from these reference and converted them to 2011 US$, for as far as the information would allow. From the reports it was not clear whether market exchange rates or ppp conversions were applied already. Some data were already expressed as costs per person; others in costs per water point or per district. Where actual average numbers per water point were known, I used these, or otherwise I used the design number of persons per water point.

Costs of water point mapping or monitoring

A main point that becomes clear is the order of magnitude of the costs of mapping or monitoring, which seems to be around some 10 cents of a dollar per person. The exact number doesn’t matter so much – that is the difference between the apple and the orange – it is the order of magnitude that is of most importance. Only the figures from Swaziland and Uganda seem to deviate a lot. Maybe Swaziland is more expensive because it is a small country, where the fixed costs of developing a water point mapping weigh relatively more on the per capita costs. Why Uganda seems so much cheaper is not clear to me, and I’d like to invite readers to share their thoughts on this.

The last weeks, I have been working on the support to the roll out of nation-wide monitoring efforts in El Salvador and Honduras. In both countries, there is an initiative is to map all water systems (not water points as nearly all are piped schemes) and collect information on the status of these systems, the service delivered and the performance of the service provider, and establish a system for ongoing monitoring of these water systems, so as to better direct post-construction support.

The work consisted of facilitating a dialogue to define the institutional arrangements for the monitoring, both in the first “sweep” of all water systems in the country, as well as for the ongoing monitoring. Both countries seem to opt for a set-up where the first sweep is done in a centralised campaign kind of way, with hired technicians collecting data from the water systems. After processing all data, a joint analysis is envisaged between staff from municipalities, water committees and these technicians. For ongoing monitoring, a set-up is envisaged in which water committees collect and update the data from their own systems, and then share these in municipal water committee meetings, where they can be analysed together with municipal staff and other water committees.

In El Salvador, an initial costing, put the cost of this set-up to about 0.30 US$/person for the first sweep and at 0.10 US$ for the ongoing monitoring. In this, the time costs of all involved, including municipal officials and members of the water committees and plumbers was quantified. In Honduras, a first pilot is underway and the first results indicate a cost of about 0.24 US$/person for the first sweep. This pilot is still underway, and particularly the step of the analysis is taking more time than expected. Interestingly, many of the monitoring efforts focus on the logistics and costs of the data collection, and surely that is a massive effort and indeed represents the bulk of the costs. But the data from Honduras suggest that the costs of analysis shouldn’t be underestimated. Many municipalities and water committees need support in the analysis, to make sense of the monitoring data and develop plans for post-construction support; support from technicians is needed in this. For the ongoing monitoring, also a budget was made, and it would come down to about 0.23 US$/person, in which again also the time costs of water committee members has been quantified.

Adding these figures to the table above, would be akin to adding some pears to the apple-orange comparison. Both in Honduras and El Salvador, the effort goes beyond water point mapping and involves a more comprehensive collection of data about water systems, service levels and service providers; it includes an analysis phase in which data are presented back to municipalities and communities and jointly analysed; costs of time of local government staff and communities is quantified. Some of this may have been the case in the countries presented in the table – or not. And in the end, that doesn’t even matter. The comparison of costs of monitoring between countries, is not to check which country is cheaper or provides “more monitoring per dollar”. One should assume that each country has tried to be as cost-effective as possible in their given context. What the comparison should do is showing that, in spite of being apples, oranges or pears, they are all fruit, and they give a reasonable idea of the costs involved in monitoring, which is somewhere between 10 and 30 cents per person. As monitoring seems to get more and more attention on the WASH sector’s agenda, this could be a first reference figure to be used in the discussions about it. But as the work on monitoring evolves, hopefully we can squeeze more comparable data out of the apples and oranges, so as to have more fruitful discussions on the costs and financing of monitoring efforts. I’d like to invite you all to contribute to the growing fruit salad of monitoring costs.

References

Dickinson, N. 2012 forthcoming. ICT for monitoring rural water services: from smart phones to cloud computing. Triple-S Working Paper. IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre

Water Point Mapping D-Group. 2012. Online Discussion Platform. http://dgroups.org/rwsn/mapping/discussions

Welle, K. 2005. Learning for Advocacy and Good Practice – WaterAid Water Point Mapping. WaterAid and ODI, UK

Reblogged from WASH in Uganda:

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This week 250 practitioners and policy makers from the Uganda Water and Environment sector met for 3 days during the annual Joint Sector Review Meeting. In my previous blog I focused on the challenge of stagnation in rural water: for the past years we haven’t seen any increase in coverage and functionality and even the spent budget for rural has remained at best at the same level over the years.

Read more… 747 more words

Let’s first look at some of the data. Various presentations highlighted the shift in demand, particularly in terms of wanting supplies on their premise (yard- or in-house taps) and larger quantities of water than the typical basic supply of 20-25 lpcd. This was found, amongst others, in the work by Jonathan Annis in Madagascar. One reason for this change in demand is convenience: not having to queue and walk is worth a lot. But also, multiple-use is a possible driver for this. The work of Ralph Hall and colleagues showed how small piped schemes in Kenya and Senegal are being used for all kinds of productive uses, even at low levels of supply. But, people with  private taps were much more likely to engage in productive uses than those without. But, having more water and water closer to the homestead could lead to even more productive uses, a point also expressed in the MUS (multiple-use services) water ladder. Ralph’s work also shows that increasing supplies to, let’s say, 50 lpcd would mostly be cost-effective, as the money earned from increased production is higher than the incremental costs of increasing the system’s capacity. This might be a strong argument for going for higher levels of service.

This is the moment when an equity purist would say: “wait a minute. It is not a good idea to advocate for higher levels of service. We cannot provide more for some, we should provide first some for all”. The argument goes that public money should first be spent on meeting the human right to water for everyone, i.e. extending coverage to each and every person. Only once that goal is met, could public money be spent on increasing levels of service. The equity purist might have a strong point. However, in many cases, it is not a bad idea to provide “a bit more for some” at the expense of “some for all”. There are several reasons for that:

First of all, it may increase the likelihood of sustainability, as users with household connections may be more likely to pay and contribute to sustainability of services, particularly when their livelihoods depend on it. The work by Ralph points to a correlation for example between the extent of multiple-uses and performance of services – though not all relations are clearly understood, as I also discussed in an earlier blog post.

Secondly, more complex systems that provide higher levels of service, may also trigger the need and the possibility to have a more professional service provider, as Jonathan Annis noted in his presentation.  

Thirdly, and obviously, if people demand it, it is difficult to stop it. Worse, when you try to stop it, it may lead to all kinds of problems. Where people want more water or closer to home, and this is not provided for, they often resort to unauthorised connections, with all kinds of other problems resulting from that, such as leakages and conflicts within communities. This lesson has been learnt before and is clearly expressed in much of the literature on multiple-use for example. People who already have some level of access to water cannot wait until the last “house on top of the mountain” is also connected, before they can make the next step on the water ladder.

So from a sustainability perspective it may make sense to provide “more for some” at the expense of “some for all”. And, though nobody has been saying that higher levels of service should be paid for by public money, it is often the case that public money is spent on the “more for some”. Sure, it is common for people with household connections to pay a higher tariff than those with standpipes, and some may also pay a connection fee. Jonathan Annis also showed in his presentation how those with household connections pay a higher tariff per m3. In theory, the funds from those with a higher level of service could often cross-subsidise those accessing public standpipes. In reality, this doesn’t always happen, and often the ones with a higher level of service, actually pay less per m3 than those with a basic level of service. Moreover, such tariffs may not include the capital investment costs. So climbing the water ladder will often be partially funded through public funds; funds, which could have also been spent on covering the uncovered. And even though this is not such a bad idea, when considering the possible sustainability gains it brings, we must recognise the tension with the equity imperative.

The main implication of this all, is that governments, donors, implementers and NGOs should start thinking much more in terms of differentiated service options. Do not make the basic level of service, the default, but give more options for higher levels of service, obviously with all due considerations for tariffs, management requirements, etc. It also calls upon us to develop and promote more differentiated service delivery models. In that sense, the results of a MUS group roundtable earlier this month, was of interest. In this meeting, MUS was further conceputalised as an approach for service delivery, for higher – or differentiated - levels of service. This and other models will be needed to facilitate the transition from the current approach to rural and small town water supply, mainly based on basic services, to more complex and differentiated services, so that in the end “a bit more for some” in fact does become a good idea.

Triple-S Ghana has put in several mechanisms to make the leap towards scale work:

• Meetings with the national level advisory committee: Triple-S gives feedback on its experiences in the districts during the bi-annual meeting with the advisory committee established by national level government. The committee is made up of all the key sector stakeholders who could play a major role in making the move towards scale possible.
• Participation in the national level learning alliance platform:  this platform brings together sector practitioners for learning and sharing. Triple-S Ghana uses the platform to actively share lessons learned in the pilot districts.
• District level learning alliance platforms:  in the three regions where Triple-S is active, the district level learning alliance platforms are being used to upscale experiences at the regional level.
• Working through existing projects: rather than starting new projects, Triple-S Ghana tries to work throughout existing projects, the World Bank Sustainable Rural Water and Sanitation project, implemented by CWSA is one of them. In this project FLOW was used as a tool for functionality mapping and is being considered for national level use.
• Representation in the Sector Working Group for Water and Sanitation:  this group brings together representatives of all donors and NGOs. Triple-S uses this platform to actively share developments and encourages these partners to take them further.
• Operational documents:  CWSA is revising its operational documents on the basis of successful pilots in the districts. These documents guide the sector and will help ensure that good ideas get upscaled.

Vida warns that change doesn’t happen overnight. People need to be convinced, and it simply takes time to change policies and modify systems. Provisions need to be made to support development partners and to support governments to be able to make adjustments to how planning and budgeting is being done, and to make a case to their financiers on adapting their policies.

So what to do to get closer to access to safe drinking water for everyone forever? Many call for more money to increase coverage and to make up for the fast growing population and further fragmentation of local government. But this is not likely to happen, since the Ugandan government is prioritising the sectors that contribute to economic growth over service sectors. On the bright side, the Ugandan sector has proven over the past years once more to be more advanced than many of its neighbours by understanding early that with increasing coverage levels, the balance between investing in new infrastructure and rehabilitation of existing, more weight needs to be given to the latter.

However, functionality levels have stayed stubbornly the same. To tackle this, the Sector Performance Report 2012 says: “With regards to technology type, the functionality trends for point water sources depict a slight improvement contrary to the trend for piped water supplies in rural areas which is on a decline. This is mainly because the financial investments required for rehabilitation of rural piped water supplies are in most cases bigger than what is provided under the District Water and Sanitation Development Conditional Grant. It is therefore important that deliberate strategies are put in place to focus on O&M of piped water supply schemes especially in rural areas and Rural Growth Centres.”  The Ministry of Water and Environment (MWE) is also recognising the need for a good balance between financing support to the services and financing the support to the support when it states “Additionally, the challenge in optimising functionality of water supply facilities may be partially attributed to the management of the rehabilitation funds at the district water office, which involves significant proportions to cover overheads and other related expenses. MWE would now like to adopt an approach of using the Lower Local Governments to plan and manage the rehabilitation funds under the supervision of the District Water Office. It is recommended that 11% of the Conditional Grant, earmarked for rehabilitation of water sources, is sent to the Lower Local Governments for effectiveness and efficiency.”

IRC is promoting the use of the life-cycle cost approach to address the challenge of financing WASH services that last and in fact Uganda has already been doing this to quite some extent avant-la-lettre as is shown above, but without using the full potential of the approach. In the given situation Uganda’s best option is to look for more efficiency and effectiveness in its finance and efforts, which means to analyse and discuss more thoroughly the planning and budgeting of both investment costs and recurrent costs (operation and maintenance, rehabilitation and support) of rural WASH services. A life-cycle-cost analysis has the additional advantage that it relates financing to the level of services provided. Therefore it will not only help with identifying where efficiency gains can be made, but will also allow for informed decisions on for instance, the (financial) ability to move users from tap points to house connections; or a gradual change from handpumps to piped schemes.

The nut has not been cracked yet, but a strong tool is available. Read more on:http://www.washuganda.net/home/washservicesforeveryoneforeveraproposaltoapplythelife-cyclecostapproachinuganda, or: http://www.washcost.info/page/2433

The big question is of course how to deal with the bad news. Luckily, in this day and age, messengers of bad news no longer get shot, but few would get praise for providing sad stats. The European Court of Auditors at least didn’t get much praise for their work in water and sanitation. A few weeks ago it presented a performance audit of European Union Development Assistance for Drinking-Water Supply and Basic Sanitation in Sub-Saharan Countries. The full report presents the audit of the implementation of EC-supported water and sanitation projects in 6 African countries, and found very similar figures to the ones mentioned earlier. Most of the infrastructure was installed well and in working order, but conditions for sustainability were largely lacking, particularly in terms of financing and capacity of the service provider. The table below says it all – scoring lots of green on delivering the outputs, but orange and red for the likelihood on sustainability. The Auditor commends the procedures of the Commission to address sustainability issue, but suggests that these need to be followed more thoroughly.

The response of the Commission can be found in the Annex to the document and is largely disappointing. It provides a long list of minor comments on specific issues. The most positive comment is that it welcomes the recommendations and promises to do better. The Commission doesn’t shoot the messenger but doesn’t seem to embrace its message either. The data would call for a more profound reflection on the approach taken. Arguably, the Commission is much better placed even than the Auditor to engage with the data and think through adjustments in its approach to do better. In reference to my previous blog, the Commission seems to be stuck in single loop learning, sticking to the existing procedures and trying to follow these in a better way.

How different is the response of DGIS (the Dutch Directorate-General for International Cooperation) to a policy review of the Dutch contribution to drinking water and sanitation in 5 countries. This report found similar type of data: good progress in infrastructure development, but problems with sustainability of service provision and poor water quality being delivered. Of course, this report was a more comprehensive and analytical report than the one by the Auditor, going into more depth on the underlying causes of poor performance and sustainability. But, DGIS also used it to critically reflect on its approaches. And, in the response (in Dutch) to Dutch parliament, it proposed a healthy mix of incremental and radical changes in its approaches so as to improve sustainability. The boldest one is arguably the sustainability clause, which would commit recipients of Dutch aid to be responsible for 10 year sustainability of service provision, a step that has already sparked lots of debate.

Undoubtedly, the many exercises of water point mapping, monitoring of water and sanitation services and audits of water projects, will provide us with more sad stats. I do hope that we don’t get paralysed by them, or get into a defensive mode, but embrace the story they tell us and use them to think not only how we can do better, but also trigger us into new ways of thinking.