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?