Symposium recaps by participants

Below are two 12 minute recaps for the first two days of interviews with participants. Many topics are covered from innovative service delivery models, learning about the true costs of service, and the strong consensus that community management is not enough on its own but usually needs extra support for an effective service delivery approach.

Day 2 Recap:


Day 1 Recap:


A video of questions and remarks for the panel discussion on the final and third day will follow with some quotes from that discussion.

Incentives for Rational Planning - Asking the Right Questions

Catarina Fonseca, WASHCost Project Director, blogs from the symposium around the finance theme:

“There are no incentives for rational planning” noted one delegate during the afternoon discussion. We were discussing the costs and financing of sustainable water, sanitation and hygiene services with around 25 of the 200 participants who decided to join one of the four parallel sessions. Is planning ever rational? Is real planning taking place at all? I first started to hear the “30%-40% lack of functionality” figure for rural water supply being quoted about seven years ago – I could never find the source of that data.

Being involved more recently in collecting financial data from donors, foundations and INGOs for the WHO UN GLAAS report, it is no surprise that one of the conclusions reached is that donors cannot easily track how aid money for the water sector is being spent. Disbursement figures from donors at international level; completion reports from governmental agencies and INGOs at national level; and any document with disaggregated real cost expenditures are extremely difficult to access.
This is illustrative of planning for rural water supply services. In the end, most decisions are political and when they are not, professional judgement rather than evidence-based data seems to guide most budgeting and financing estimates in the sector.

According to one government official, “there is no driver to make more cost effective decisions because they are someone else’s decisions anyway”. In other words, banks make their own decisions; donors make their own decisions; and national level or district level governments make their own decisions. In effect, this makes them the ‘end providers’ of finance, deciding where to allocate funds (transfers, tariffs or tax). In practice however, they are not accountable to anyone.
There is little accountability on the outcomes of financing flows to the sector. The questions and comments seem to stop at: ‘How many people do you think this handpump reaches?’; ‘No one is demanding service-oriented accountability, so does this mean that the poorest in this area have been receiving a minimum standard of service for the last 10 years therefore leaving no incentive to collect, analyse or share costing information?’

In the end it is not that we as sector players are irrational. It is just that no one seems to be asking with any persistence for the real financial expenditures because so far, no one needs them. However, as water coverage increases for new services but stagnates or declines for existing services, it becomes increasingly difficult however to ignore the constant injection of capital investment in infrastructure with limited functionality after a couple of years; turn a blind eye to everything else; and keep making the same type of investments and investment decisions that have been exercised over the past 10 years knowing that this will not affect scale or lead to change.

Elation or singular disappointment

Tanvi Nagpal, Director of Water and Sanitation Initiatives at Global Water Challenge, blogs from Kampala and writes about the first day of the symposium:

Elation or singular disappointment—it’s hard to untangle how one should react to the day’s discussion. One after the other, professionals, government officers, and researchers who have committed decades of their professional careers to the provision of safe water and sanitation to communities, confessed that the sector had really failed to deliver on its basic promise of increasing access for the rural poor. One would think that all this introspection would lead to some amount of dejection, but if there was any, it was hard to find. Instead, it appeared that people were moving – at different speeds—to a common understanding that the focus on building infrastructure that somehow would translate into access, had failed. Especially in rural Africa, the failure rates of communal handpumps, is now recognized to be so alarming , that it seems irresponsible to put another dollar into a communally-managed handpump. When Sally Sutton pointedly asked why it was that so many households with “access to communal supplies still invested in self-supply” it became clear that the level of services that are delivered by many communal sources are so abysmal that households with any disposable incomes invest in their own supply source as soon as possible. That might also explain why so many rural households switch to open ponds and rivers in many months of the year—it is easier than struggling with a drippy tap which may be a half hour walk from the house. There is a good chance that the “access to source” language that we have all used will begin to change in the coming years. The challenge will be to open ourselves to the simple understanding that people everywhere want some variant of what I have—water supply in my home that is reliable in both quantity and quality, and for which I pay a relatively modest part of my income. If that is the case, every possible way of delivering such a supply, whether it is a utility, the local private sector or autonomous community-based institution will have to be explored. There is a pretty decent chance that initial investment in such supply will probably be higher than in a handpump, but really how could it be much higher than the infrastructure which fails way before its promised lifetime?

Aims of the symposium

The symposium aims to:

a) provide a platform for learning about and sharing possible ways of improving initiatives on sustainable rural water services at scale
b) debate and analyse these emerging initiatives, and
c) identify common principles to facilitate improved policy and practise in water service delivery.

In addition, the symposium intends to strengthen synergy and collaboration across different initiatives and platforms to address sustainability.

Thematic streams:

• Service delivery models for sustainable rural water – topic managed by Rural Water Supply Network (RWSN)/SKAT. We will look at practical examples and ask what change processes are needed at sector level to come to more sustainable service delivery models.
• Water service governance at decentralised levels – topic managed by Water and Sanitation Program (WSP). We will explore practical case studies of how governance over services can be strengthened, particularly at decentralised level in order to provide sustainable services at scale.
• Financing for sustainable service delivery – topic managed by IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre (IRC). In this thematic stream, discerning the real costs of a sustainable service and how these may be financed will form key to the discussion and exchanges.
• Harmonisation and alignment in the rural sector – topic managed by the Ministry of Water and Environment (MWE) of the Government of Uganda with inputs from WaterAid. In this thematic stream, participants will dialogue on the potential of harmonising, aligning and coordinating initiatives in the water sector and will also explore cases where harmonisation may stifle innovation, particularly at the operational level.

Preparing for the symposium

The International Symposium on Rural Water Services: Providing Sustainable Water at Scale is now ready to launch tomorrow morning at 9.00 am (GMT +2). Follow this blog to get various participant perspectives on the topics of the symposium. Depending on the quality of internet access, some video interviews will be uploaded at the end of each day as well. We look forward to the comments of those following us.

Twitter users can use the hashtag #sug2010 to post news about the symposium and to follow it.

Some of the topics to be discussed are:
1. Identifying challenges to sustainable service delivery
2. Principles and good practices to overcome challenges
3. Sector change processes
4. The way forward

Each will have parallel sessions on models for sustainable service delivery, costs and finance, harmonisation and coordination, and governance.