Glimmers of hope are emerging in the water and sanitation sector that could beat back the tide of status quo sector failures and truly offer measurable hope for transformative change worldwide. These glimmers are most welcome and must be capitalized on to meet the ambitious 2015 MDG targets established by developing countries in Johannesburg (2000).

New sanitation approaches that hold great promise could finally break the cycle of highly subsidized latrine construction. Monitoring will be the sector norm as opposed to the exception. Water For People has abandoned annual beneficiaries as the only real sector yardstick of programmatic impact and it is possible that others will adopt similar approaches that focus on long-term field outcomes as a better reflection of organizational excellence. Sector finance will be transformed as well, with new sources of funding playing a more innovative role than is the case today. Governments will become more efficient, effective and transparent in the allocation of sector resources, as will NGOs, private sector, bilateral and multilateral development agencies.

But perhaps one of the biggest changes, with potentially the most significant impact, will be the transformation of simplistic “community-based management” models in the field with more robust and effective alternatives. This transformation is especially important in Africa and Asia given this simple reality—there is not enough technical capacity, time or finance now or in the distant future to train every village in Africa and Asia to operate a mini-utility at community level. Alternative models that can lead the sector to more sustainable water systems are both needed and emerging.

The Water Committee—An ineffective relic that needs to be transformed

Pictures of village women, mostly girls, collecting water from the river or a dirty scoop hole, coupled with stories of sickness and extreme distances travelled to collect poisonous water galvanize justifiable concern. We are rightly outraged at this global injustice! A project is needed, and fast. 

We raise funds, choose a water technology to solve a targeted community’s problem and commence construction.

A village-level water committee is formed at some point to manage the project. The water committee usually has a President, a Treasurer, a Secretary and often a Vice President. Some committees have a local mechanic (operator) on the committee itself, while others have access to a local mechanic who has been trained to repair the new water system. The committee members are chosen by the community, and usually consist of driven individuals who often played a large role in the development of the project. 

A well run business that is providing affordable water to residents of Blantyre, creating paying jobs for staff and extending water services to unserved areas by reinvesting their finance in new taps.

Truth is that the development of the committee is most often rushed and implemented as an afterthought. The focus of the project is on the “hardware”—the handpumps or taps and supply lines that make up a “project”—and rarely is time, energy and resources allocated to the “software”—management and tariff development to secure the necessary on-going finance required to keep the hardware functioning over time. Quick training of the committee is sadly the norm (if any real training occurs at all), and committee members have rarely been given the support required to effectively do their new jobs.

Sadly, Africa and Asia are littered not just with broken water systems but also with failed committees, even in cases where committee training was considerable and well done. The reasons for this are not hard to understand:

1. Committees are almost universally voluntary. They are serving a public function, in poor areas, and so the idea that they actually make money from a water project is blasphemous to many good-willed development organizations. The impact of this policy is clear though—over time, it becomes harder for members to volunteer their time and energy to this project, especially when income-generating opportunities present themselves. Committees eventually disintegrate under such conditions.
2. Initial enthusiasm for the project understandably wanes over time and the drivers that initiated the project (because they are drivers) often initiate other developmental activities that take their time and attention away from the water project. Transferring to a new committee is often the beginning of the end of even the best managed projects.
3. Particularly well-trained committees often apply their skills in new ways and in new locations. Plumbers in particular often take their new-found skills to small towns and cities where they can earn much needed money, leaving the project without the technical capacity to maintain their new system.
4. Fraud and fear of it lead many communities around Africa and Asia to speak emotionally and angrily about a local committee that embezzled some money from a community project. Funds are sometimes, sadly, stolen. Ironically a bigger problem is the perception that funds have been stolen by committee members. Committees often do not manage their books in a clean way for a host of reasons (too busy, poor training, improper selection of treasurers, running out of financial books and receipts, etc). The funds are often available but the committee cannot actually demonstrate that to the broader community, leading to allegations of corruption when none actually exists. Cases of actual corruption and situations characterized by the perception of corruption lead to the same outcome—families stop paying, the committee disintegrates and the water project eventually falters.
5. NGOs often fail to plan for the supply chain. A committee could be doing everything correctly until the day when a key spare part is needed that is unobtainable (or the initial supply of spares provided by the implementing NGO runs dry). While some components (like taps) are often available, there is a long list of handpump parts that are almost impossible to access. Find an O-ring or foot valve for an Afridev handpump in rural Niassa Province, Mozambique and you would be a lucky person. Niassa is hardly unique—store owners are reluctant to stock spares, because they would rather use the available shelf space for items that sell regularly. Seemingly well run projects begin to disintegrate as families start to complain about the money they have paid for water and question the committee’s competence—a very hard stigma to live with in many parts of the world. The committee did nothing wrong in this case—fault lies with the NGO who did not think of or resolve this common challenge. Good projects fall apart because a project was implemented without careful consideration of the supply chain needed to sustain the water system over time.
6. Tariff development—including support for changing tariffs over time—is almost non-existent in the sector. If tariffs are considered they tend to focus on what people can afford to pay rather than a hard analysis of what the actual operation and maintenance (O&M) and replacement costs that will one day be required to transition from the existing hardware to new hardware.¹They often fail to take into account the costs associated with training, capacity building and committee turnover.

A New Way Forward

But this is not the case universally.  More progressive and thoughtful organizations allocate considerable time and energy to water system management, experiment with alternative management models and are not boxed in by the stagnant community management models described above.  These approaches are sharply focused on:

• The real costs of sustaining water supplies over time, with a particular emphasis on system replacement costs.
• Developing the enabling environment necessary for water to continue flowing – which means ensuring that key support and back-up is available and accessible to communities from local government, the local private sector and civil society to help address challenges that inevitably emerge beyond a community’s capacity to resolve.
• Realizing that good management most often means that managers need to make some money for their efforts.  New approaches eliminate volunteerism and develop tariffs that strike a balance between affordability for consumers, lifeline tariffs for those completely unable to pay, and financial viability for service providers so that water continues to flow.
• Increasingly focus on multi-village support schemes that lure the local private sector to the water sector, in roles as varied as mobile mechanics contracted by communities to keep water flowing for a fee, to franchising models where private operators offer communities improved water supplies and on-going service, again for a fee.

A more progressive approach considers the real costs of sustaining water supplies and system replacement.

Moving in a direction that focuses more carefully on software (the people and systems that keep water flowing, rather than hardware such as pipes and pumps) will have a number of implications for US-based implementing agencies.  First, the dominance in the US on engineering-only-driven approaches will rightly fade as engineering takes its rightful place in support of software-driven programming.  Time requirements required to develop tariffs and implement more thoughtful projects will transform the stand-alone, externally designed and work brigade/experiential-approach that is common and ineffective.  And local government and the local private sector will rightly emerge as key actors in community development – messy as that can be – and not sidelined or displaced as is the reality in far too many cases.  Multi-village solutions will emerge.  Solutions that balance the software and the hardware will yield long-lasting results. Fewer broken pumps will dot the landscape. This new programmatic approach will transform sector behavior so that stories of water systems running for decades, with new systems installed without the help of external NGOs, become the norm.

¹Tariffs that cover O&M and replacement are hard because the amount of money collected eventually becomes quite large, which raises fears of theft.