Category: Sustainable Services

Islands of success

Evaluation of a Water For People intervention in partnership with local government India

Stef Smits's avatarwater services that last

Sagar is an island at the mouth of the river Ganges where it meets the Bay of Bengal. Every year in January, about half a million pilgrims visit the island to worship at the holy Ganges. The hundreds of mobile toilet units standing on the empty festival terrain during the rest of the year are witness to the island’s authority’s efforts to ensure that the pilgrim’s stay on the island is as comfortable, hygienic and safe as possible. But the authorities also don’t forget about the 200.000 permanent inhabitants when it comes to sanitation. Together with the NGO Water For People (WFP) and other partners, it seeks to achieve full coverage in sanitation and water supply in the next few years.

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Sustainability Tools and Clauses

Thoughts on the Sustainability Clauses, by Jonathan Annis

editor's avatarWater, sanitation and hygiene service monitoring

By Jonathan Annis

Maintaining sustainability (or longevity as I prefer to think of it) of water services requires an ecosystem of support. This ecosystem includes but is not limited to policy, financing, planning, learning, harmonization, and technology. The ecosystem is complex and nonlinear; the broad categories are highly interdependent and failure in one aspect can have a domino effect on the others.  Indeed, services are delivered, like children are raised, with the support of an entire village.

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Sustainability checks, clauses and compacts – USAID and DGIS lead the way

Blog by Stef Smits of IRC on ways that funders can improve sustainability of WASH projects

editor's avatarwater services that last

By Stef Smits

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 widelydebated . 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.

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A visit to Gammarth, Tunisia, or what I learnt at the African Development Bank’s retreat for rural water and sanitation

Thoughts on the RWSSI meeting at the African Development Bank in Tunisia

editor's avatarwater services that last

By Harold Lockwood

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.

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Promising solutions for Operations and Maintenance in rural Uganda

by Francis Mujuni, World Vision Uganda
One of the challenges facing the Water sector in rural areas in Uganda is the non-functionality of hand pumps due unaffordable hand pump spare parts and limited financial base for paying the hand pump mechanics (HPM) and hence a major hindrance in the  access to safe and clean water.
New Picture
Francis Mujuni,
Northern Region Coordinator,
Uganda Water Sanitation and Hygiene Project,
World Vision Uganda

Rural poverty, although not homogeneous, is deep and widespread. The widely cited “dollar-a-day” poverty measure conceals the fact that individuals in many rural Ugandan households handle cash sums much smaller than a dollar. Households and communities where income-generating opportunities are very limited simply cannot pay the tariffs required for hand pump operation and maintenance (O&M). Cash which is always scarce is used for very essential commodities like food and shelter but not for water which traditionally has always been seen as a “God given gift” to humanity to be enjoyed naturally by everyone, freely!
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Reflection on last week’s Sustainability Forum in Washington DC

adejesusirc's avatarwater services that last

By: Harold Lockwood, Aguaconsult and Triple-S

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.

Image

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reflections on Everyone, Forever and lifecycle costing in Honduras

Stef Smits's avatarwater services that last

Anyone who works in the water sector cannot have missed the various consultations and debates on the post-2015 goals for water and sanitation, with the official one taking place here, but also good online discussions, such as the one on The Broker online. At the same time, technical proposals have been developed by working groups on water, sanitation and hygiene, as nicely presented here by my colleague Catarina Fonseca. The consensus in both the technical proposals and the discussions around them is the vision of universal coverage. The difference lies in the time frame: can it be achieved in our life time? Or is that just wishful thinking? Over the past year, this blog has paid lots of attention to the “Forever” side of “Everyone, Forever”, as Water For People have so compellingly called it. For the coming period expect more posts here on the…

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