Long, expensive & messy: the realities of sector change

By Patrick Moriarty, Harold Lockwood, Vida Duti and Sarah Carriger

In the last post in this series we described our approach to changing the whole system to deliver water services that people can count on: not just for a few years, but for life. We laid out the main phases in this change: initiation, learning and testing, and finally scaling-up and systemic impact. In this post we’d like to show you what that looks in the real world, using the example of our work in Ghana under the Triple-S (Sustainable Services at Scale) project.

One of the reasons we chose to work in Ghana was that it was typical of many countries: they’d made significant progress in increasing coverage, but they had significant problems, particularly in their rural water sector, with lack of financing for repairs and replacements, weak supply chains for spare parts, and poor support from local government…