Voice of the Public Official: Delivering Urban Water and Sanitation Services for All
March 16, 2011
Andy Narracott, Chief of Party for the African Cities for the Future Program
Paul Gunstensen, Funding Manager at Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP)
In Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP)'s annual gathering of program staff and partners last year, public officials from 14 utilities and municipalities voiced a range of interlinking and complex challenges they faced in extending and maintaining urban water and sanitation services in their cities. They boiled down into three critical areas: lack of capacity and incentives; proven effective models; and channelling of finance to where it’s most needed.
Capacity and incentives: A recent survey found that one of the most common constraints to effective water and sanitation service provision is a lack of capacity and resources at the local level. Low capacity, inefficient and financially weak service providers in large part account for the poor quality of urban services; many cities do not recover their operation and maintenance costs from user charges and fare poorly on performance parameters such as availability of water, non-revenue water (NRW) and staff efficiency. This results in a cycle of poor services, lagging revenue collection, weak finances, inadequate maintenance, deteriorating assets and lagging coverage. This situation is compounded by political influence at senior management level and the regular rotation of these positions with the challenges this brings.
Effective models: A range of approaches to addressing inadequate WASH have been attempted in the challenging circumstances presented by low income urban areas, including interventions by NGOs operating at a traditional scale and level of impact. However, as the negligible progress in urban areas attests, these have not proven viable for sustainable scaling up to achieve city-wide impact. There is limited practical evidence of effective, sustainable and scalable methods of improving WASH services to urban poor men, women and children – and a lack of demonstration of such evidence through training. As a result, service providers fail to invest in low income areas, or only do so using traditional approaches. In the absence of alternative provision, small independent providers (SIPs) emerge which operate outside regulatory frameworks.
Targeting finance to address the issues: Large scale investments in urban WASH are primarily led by the international financial institutions (IFIs) and are typically targeted at large scale capital works, rarely prioritising extension of services into low income areas. For example, a study of Asian Development Bank water and sanitation projects found that, despite overall increases in service levels, the poor(est) were excluded from these benefits. Data from a recent survey show that governments have generally not applied or developed criteria or formulae to allocate funding equitably to and within urban/rural communities for sanitation and drinking-water and to ensure distribution of funding to unserved populations.
Evidence from the sector demonstrates that it is feasible to deliver effective and sustainable improved water and sanitation services in low income urban areas and that these service improvements can be beneficial for both the urban poor and the service providers. The emphasis needs to be on viability and scalability.
As WSUP has shown, this can be achieved through the delivery of integrated urban WASH programmes which centre on demonstrating sustainable and scalable pro-poor models to service delivery and working in partnership with the full range of service providers (including SIPs), civil society and communities to design, deliver and manage effective service improvements in low income areas. Supporting the mainstreaming of these models into service provider business plans and investment priorities as well as IFI financed investment programmes ensures that significant impact at scale is possible.
WSUP’s experience is that these programs should be guided by underlying principles of partnership, capacity development, participation, innovation, fostering the local private sector, integrating gender sensitive approaches and mainstreaming viable and effective models into business plans, policies and investment planning in order to reach scale. The coordination of activities with other sector initiatives to crowd in investment and capitalise on comparative advantages is also integral to these programmes and interventions.
Some lesssons
A specific example of how to address some of the challenges noted above comes from Madagascar where the public utility JIRAMA and WSUP have been working to roll out a non revenue water (NRW) reduction programme across the capital city Antananarivo.
From the outset an accurate assessment of the NRW level in the city was unknown and internal capacity within the utility to assess and address this was limited. It was not seen as a priority as the potential impact of reducing NRW on both water capacity and revenues was an unknown. A severe limiting factor on JIRAMA’s ability to extend water services in Antananarivo is its ability to increase water capacity into its network.
To address this, a joint programme was designed to install pressure reducing valves and improve water management on a trial basis in one Commune of the city. This was augmented by training and capacity development for JIRAMA staff in techniques and approaches for NRW reduction.
From this trial area, JIRAMA has recorded water saving of approximately 8,000 m3 per month since January 2010 providing increased capacity within the water network. In addition, a 40% increase in revenue being collected by JIRAMA for that Commune was also recorded.
As a result, JIRAMA is in the process of developing an NRW strategy for its operations across the city and country and has recognised the viability of providing services in low income areas by including these areas into business plans and investment decisions.
WSUP is working with public officials across all its programs to institutionalise these sorts of approaches into their mainstream business practices, helping to transform these essential public services into ones that run with efficiency, productivity, and financial sustainability.
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WSUP
Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP) is a tri-sector partnership between the private sector, civil society and academia focused on addressing the increasing global problem of inadequate access to water and sanitation for the urban poor and the attainment of the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets, particularly those relating to water and sanitation. http://www.wsup.com/
Paul Gunstensen is the Funding Manager at WSUP and has been working in the international WASH sector for the last 7 years accessing and managing funding from bilateral and multilateral donor agencies and private foundations.
Andy Narracott is Chief of Party for the African Cities for the Future program – a multi-country USAID program which aims to expand water supply and basic sanitation access among Africa’s fast growing poor urban/slum populations using innovate community-based approaches.
