Learning Event: Meeting the Challenge of Sustainability for WASH Investments

Tuesday 31^st January 2012, London. Spaces are limited. For further information contact Richard Ward at r.ward@aguaconsult.co.uk

How can we best address the challenge of establishing durable WASH services and what role can different actors including NGOs and private companies play in that process as responsible development partners? Moreover, how can we as development partners start to change the way we operate and modify the systems and procedures that we employ to maximise the chances that our assistance will lead to more sustainable results?

The focus of this one day learning and sharing event is to make a shift in the way we work - from an infrastructure focus (which counts the numbers of water and sanitation systems built) to a service delivery approach (which measures the quality of access to WASH services over time).

Audience

The event is for WASH intervention implementers -- NGOs, charities and consultants engaged in WASH projects in developing countries. Donors, foundations and research agencies are also invited to share their experiences and perspectives. Participants from around 80 organisations will be in attendance.

Objectives

• Encourage dialogue and debate on promoting sustainable services and working at scale, including an assessment of the underlying causes of poor sustainability and how we can think about changing our approaches
• Share innovative approaches to service delivery and cases of how organisations themselves have tried to change their own policies and methods for measuring service provision, with concrete examples
• Brainstorm and identify specific actions that can be taken in the short- and long-term by participating organisations within the context of delivering increased coverage, including engagement with the collaborative processes within the sector

Organisers

• Triple-S, an initiative of IRC, Water and Sanitation Centre of The Netherlands
• Aguaconsult, a partner in Triple-S
• Water for People, a USA-based NGO
• Global Water Challenge
• WaterAid

Background

During the past twenty years we have been relatively successful in providing new water and sanitation infrastructure - building the physical systems - across many countries in the south. However, despite this trend there has to a large extent been a failure to find durable solutions to meet the needs of the poor for safe, reliable domestic services. Rural and peri-urban populations in particular face continuing and unacceptable problems with systems that fail prematurely, leading to wasted resources and false expectations.

Although figures vary, studies from different countries indicate that at any one time somewhere between 30% and 40% of systems either do not function at all, or operate significantly below design expectations. There are more alarming examples, such as a recent WaterAid study from Tanzania, which found that nearly half (46%) of improved public water points in rural areas are not functioning, and that after only two years following installation 25% of systems are already non-functional. Slippage - where some communities and users fall back to an unserved state (indicating lack of sustainability) - is rising up the agenda. This is especially the case in India where slippage has been acknowledged and efforts made to measure it, and also increasingly in other countries such as Ghana.

Changing the way we work

Conventionally many development partners have carried out ‘projects’, which tend to be time-bound interventions. Such approaches do not always lend well to contributing to broader systems and capacities that can provide a sustainable service in the long term. Such systems - often referred to as the enabling environment - are necessary to ensure that services continue to be provided, long after any specific intervention or action has come to an end. This is one of the simplest and most powerful definitions of sustainability.

To achieve sustainability - and to benefit the whole population - involves engagement with a wide variety of actors, understanding the changing situation, identifying problems and finding solutions. It involves a better understanding of the life-cycle costs of a service and the creation of collaborative partnerships between those with legal responsibility, the people intended to benefit from services, the people providing the services and any external support agencies.

Marking the shift from a focus on projects producing physical infrastructure and training users in a one off intervention, to one which supports the delivery of permanent services, has deep implications for the way we work as development partners. One very tangible change can be in the way we think about monitoring the impact of our work. The project focus does not readily lend itself to the monitoring of longer-term outcomes.

If organisations are judged - and judge themselves - on the delivery of outputs within logframes which focus on short-term projects, then these more long-term goals will not be articulated, as organisations can be seen to be setting themselves up to fail. But in order to assure or at least understand long-term sustainability, monitoring systems need to be established to measure change over much longer periods of time.

Many people in a range of organisations are aware of this challenge and are trying to change the way they do business. There are efforts to reach greater consistency around indicators which demonstrate sustainable service delivery, and recent calls within the sector to agree upon a common set of guiding principles. In seeking to make these changes, some organisations have subscribed to a Sustainability WASH Charter which sets out exactly these types of guiding principles.