Moving Beyond Indicators and Funding Debates
August 10, 2010
By Ned Breslin, Special for Monday Developments
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The water and sanitation sector has been intervening in people’s lives worldwide for decades. Billions of dollars have been invested in new water points and latrines, driven by good-hearted desires to overcome dire water and sanitation challenges worldwide. The sector generally makes its case for support by bombarding policy-makers, donors and the general public with data about how big the crisis is, suggestions of financial gaps between current
allocations and sector requirements, and personal stories of triumph and tragedy: Rajashi in Delhi getting a new toilet through microfinance, Feliciano tasting his first drops of clean water, and Ophelia’s struggles because she walks all day collecting water for her family from a dirty scoop hole in the desert. Fair enough, but the water and sanitation sector has generally survived—and at times thrived—on a combination of tragic statistics coupled with anecdotes and cherry-picked stories of success that stand in sharp contrast to the post-project reality on the ground, where sustainability remains elusive. This contrast between compelling but perhaps somewhat isolated stories of success, and the reality of broken water points and filled, abandoned latrines will one day, rightly, undermine the sector.
The stories we almost never hear about are of villages that were supported 10 years ago and where they are today. The true success stories would be about villages that sustained their water supplies after external support ended and reinvested in new infrastructure with some combination of their own finances and local government finances, showing that external NGO, bilateral or multilateral support is in fact no longer needed. I suspect such a story of success, which is compelling, transformative and energizing, is rarely told because it is rarely found. And it is rarely found because: (1) few projects have succeeded at truly eliminating water and sanitation poverty without additional interventions from outside organizations; and (2) few organizations actually know what happened in the villages they supported after a project ends.
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