Mozambique – Rural Water Supply Network

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

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 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.

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A few weeks ago, an interesting email discussion was held on “water point mapping” D-Group of the Rural Water Supply Network (RWSN). Part of the discussion focused on how much it costs to map or monitor all water systems in a country. Various figures were floating around in the discussion. But when looking at these in more detail, it was like comparing apples to oranges. Some of the costs mentioned had included the staff time of (local) government, others hadn’t, as they considered this to be a fixed cost; some referred only to a simple mapping of water points, others had done a more comprehensive collection of all kinds of data of the water points; some of the data were expressed in dollars per water point, others in local currency per person. So, no immediate sense could be made of the numbers. A former colleague once said: “an apple is…

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