The day the ribbon is cut is just the start, not the end

Many development organizations active in the rural water sector use powerful images to promote their good causes, often involving smiling children or politicians cutting a ribbon to inaugurate a new hand-pump or tap-stand. These photos are compelling. They tell a story of new services and new hope and they make many people down the development chain happy—they make individual givers and taxpayers feel good, they are great fund-raising tools for aid agencies and they serve the political interests of local and national leaders.

But what of the reality? What happens a year after the ribbon is cut? Or five years, or fifteen years? The real story behind the photographs is not so positive. We have made gains in building new infrastructure in the rural sector, but between 1990 and 2006, the absolute number of unserved people across 19 sub-Saharan African countries has gone up by 37 million to 228 million (RWSN, 2009). In part this is due to population growth, but shamefully many of those who supposedly count as having been ‘served’ actually have systems that are now not working properly or have failed completely. Figures collated by the Rural Water Supply Network indicate an average rate of 36 percent non-functionality for hand pumps in sub-Saharan Africa. This level of failure represents a total investment of between $1.2 and $1.5 billion in the last 20 years. A more recent study by Wateraid from Tanzania is even more shocking—it states that nearly half (46 percent) of public improved water points in rural areas are not functioning and that after only two years following installation 25 percent of systems are already non-functional (Taylor, 2009).

Failure rates have been particularly high for hand-pump based technologies in sub-Saharan Africa, but for other technologies and in other countries the picture has also been grim. The human cost behind these figures is even worse. The importance of a safe and reliable water supply near at hand for improved health, for saving time and drudgery and for economic opportunity are known. But what about people’s hopes and confidence? What happens when the supposed progress a new water system brings—often built with the sweat of the community—falls apart?

Where did Father Christmas go?

"When they came to build the water project we said 'this is Father Christmas coming with his gifts, but when we encountered the first problems with the pipes, we found out that Father Christmas had left to go back to the pole."

~ Community member from the village of Bokito in rural Cameroon (Moriarty and Schouten, 2003)

Are we missing the bigger picture?

Funding support for rural water comes through different channels and organizations. Charities and aid agencies make grants and ‘gifts’, donor governments and multi-lateral organizations such as UNICEF provide more structured grants and the World Bank and other lending agencies provide soft loans. Of course governments of developing countries and local organizations also have a role to play. These actors have different functions; some just give, whereas others implement projects or programs directly. Over the last two decades most of these agencies have promoted the community management model. Other models have also been applied, including self-supply, delegated private sector contracting and utility-based provision, but in many countries community management has been adopted as official government policy. Donor governments and large international NGOs have also heavily supported this model, often with parallel programs operating in the same countries. 

The community management model has undoubtedly brought many benefits and has succeeded in establishing small “islands of success”. However, in most countries around the world it has by and large failed to achieve the ultimate goal of reliable and sustainable water supply at scale. There appear to be a number of fundamental barriers to reaching this aim:

• A focus of intervention at the level of the community, which is inherently ‘un-scalable’;
• A failure to invest in sector systems and ‘carrying capacity’, including supporting policy development, monitoring, training and regulatory frameworks;
• A continued focus of investment on the construction of new water supply systems, rather than taking into account the full life-cycle costs of service delivery, including rehabilitation, asset replacement and indirect support costs; and
• A persistent lack of coordination and harmonization—often driven by competing donor and NGO agendas—leading to fragmented policies and implementing practices and a failure to align with government policies.

Figure 1: Water service delivery from the user perspective: repeated disappointment or a service delivery approach?

Support a service not a project

If we are to break the pattern of failed and failing water supply infrastructure we must move from one-off ‘projects’ to a full service delivery approach. In part this flies in the face of the philanthropic or ‘charity water’ paradigm which is driven by good intentions, but often results in isolated projects that soon start to fall down. Conversely, providing a service implies taking a systemic approach to building the carrying capacity of a national sector and this means actions at all levels, not just in the village or small town. It means improving policies and legislation, financial disbursement mechanisms and regulation and investing in post-construction support and training—all of which are not overtly politically expedient actions (remembering our ribbon-cutting ceremony), but vital if the physical systems are to be sustained. This, in the long term, is the only real option if we want to see mature, strong and adaptive water sectors emerge.

Paying the price for a proper service

Adopting a service delivery approach implies supporting the full life-cycle costs of delivering such a service, not only the one-off investment costs of capital projects. The standard rallying cry of most donors is: “we don’t do operations and maintenance or rehabilitation—this would not be sustainable and is the responsibility of government and users”.  However, for most low-income countries the reality is that few, if any, are able to cover the full range of costs of supplying a service. Even in cases where there is very strong consumer participation, they still only cover operation, maintenance and some replacement costs with a patchy record of (government) paying for some of the other direct and indirect support costs.

A broken Afridev hand pump photo by Akvo, Netherlands

In order to appreciate this sensitive issue of long-term financial support, we should perhaps take a look into our own backyards. In many countries in Europe it took from two to four generations before users were able to pay almost what it costs to supply them with drinking water. Today’s European consumers still don’t fully meet these costs, even in England and Wales, where privatization came along with the cancellation of accumulated debts in the 1980s.  In rural areas people still don’t pay for the service, and will probably never will. For example, in the U.S., the Federal government continues to underwrite the real costs of community water services through annual appropriations to capitalize infrastructure loan and grant programmes run through the U.S. Environment Protection Agency (to the tune of over $90 billion since 1972)¹.

Getting in line

Finally, taking a service delivery approach means that external actors, the funders and the ‘doers’, need to be better coordinated, both between themselves and with national government priorities and policies. A report issued by the EU Water Initiative, Africa Working Group, shows that despite international calls for greater alignment, more than two-thirds (71 percent) of all European financing is channelled through projects and programs, with about a fifth of all aid classified as ‘not coordinated’ with national government programs (Fonseca and Diaz, 2008). Consolidated data for NGOs and charity water agencies is not available, but field experience tells us that non-alignment is an even greater challenge for some of these groups. 

By consistently working around instead of through government frameworks we run the risk of duplication and undermining national accountability to ensure the provision of basic services to citizens. Government is not perfect. There are real concerns with inefficiencies and corruption, but only by working with sector systems to strengthen them will we move away from an endless cycle of aid dependency and improve capacity as the rightful long-term solution.