Toilet Talk from World Water Week

August 25, 2011
By John Sauer, Assistant Director, Thought Leadership

http://www.tonicgen.com/p/toilet-talk-from-swedenworld-water-week/

This week the Stockholm International Water Institute is convening the 21st annual World Water Week. By coincidence the non-government organization Water For People celebrated its 20th anniversary earlier this year; two efforts of a similar age.

Water For People’s path started like many of the water and sanitation organizations participating in World Water Week. It saw a need, and village by village, community by community – with outside financing – started to build water infrastructure. The problem was that on average – across the water and sanitation sector – upwards of 40% of projects failed.

So Water For People evolved realizing that this linear approach was not enough. The sustainability of the programs was not demonstrable and the outcomes, in comparison with the need, were minimal. Over the past several years, Water For People has completely shifted its approach from building one project at a time to a complex approach that adheres to key principles and holds itself accountable for broader outcomes.

Working to ensure every family, clinic, and school has access to water in a municipality or district is one of these outcomes. Another requires co-financing from both the local government and the households themselves, and requires appropriate tariff and management structures are put in place to ensure long term operation, maintenance and system upgrades. Water For People commits to monitor its work for at least 10 years and programs in a way that no foreign NGO is ever needed again where it has worked. Water For People also challenges itself that a similar program will be replicated in the country where it works with no financial support from Water For People.

So are others in the water and sanitation sector, including the Stockholm International Water Institute, also going through these transformative changes? Is twenty years a magic number?

There is some indication that this is happening. An array of NGOs and donors recently signed on to a sustainability charter, which highlights the importance of programming for long term success. This charter has been endorsed by Hilton Foundation, WaterAid, Global Water Challenge, World Vision, and others.

Partnerships like Sanitation and Water For All are supporting governments, like Liberia, to develop plans and build capacity to greatly scale up water and sanitation coverage. The key will be how this national-level prioritization translates into local-government and community level co-financing. The government has stressed commitment to pioneering country-wide monitoring and evaluation using android cell phones and cloud computing. This innovative work might help achieve the bridge that is often missing between national policies and on-the-ground implementation.

Interesting approaches are being tested and studied, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s shot at reinventing the toilet, which they announced last month in Kigali, Rwanda. Incubating and developing local businesses and entrepreneurs to provide sanitation services is also happening more. This approach seeks sustainable sanitation delivery by assisting local businesses and entrepreneurs to better respond to sanitation needs by supporting them with the commercial practice of market segmentation. This is a dramatic shift to the business-as-usual approach, supply-led strategies of subsidizing infrastructure for one beneficiary at a time. This approach focuses on building up businesses that will market and “sell” toilets rather than “build” them.

These new partnerships and approaches hopefully represent an evolution and an opportunity for the water and sanitation sector to turn a corner toward a sustainable future. World Water Week can embrace this change by challenging the leaders who attend its important event to think even bigger the next twenty years.

What do you think?

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