Everyone Defined

May 6, 2011
By Ned Breslin

With a bolt of blinding light, gust of wind, and bottomless fountain of water strapped to her back, the superheroin of water descends upon the village and all who are thirsty rush to receive her gifts. She’s here to solve their need for safe drinking water. They all leave with their jugs full and families are content. But tomorrow – what happens then? What if she doesn’t return?

Water For People’s mission says we are working towards a world where EVERYONE has access to improved supplies of water and hygienic sanitation services.

Our goal is to create the foundations for countries to develop, communities to thrive, girls and boys to attend school, and water- and sanitation-related diseases to be so dramatically reduced that they no longer are a threat - FOREVER.

A big ambition! How do we approach this grand goal so that it is achievable, and not simply a chapter from comic book fiction?

The short answer: Water For People’s path to success is built upon the efforts and engagement of EVERYONE.

EVERYONE
Water For People’s path to success is built upon the efforts and engagement of EVERYONE. To achieve this, we focus our finances, technical support and creativity in geographically defined regions in the countries where we work. We concentrate on initiating a process that moves these districts and municipalities from whatever level of coverage they are currently at to full coverage – so that EVERYONE in that district or municipality has access to improved supplies of water and hygienic sanitation services, forever.

When We Say EVERYONE, Who Do We Mean?
EVERYONE means exactly – EVERYONE. Rich and poor, easy to reach and hard to reach. Politically connected and politically isolated. Every family, every school, every clinic – EVERYONE.

We recognize that populations change over time, and the program will only be a success if the services delivered actually change with the populations of the districts/municipalities. It is not good enough to simply reach the target of full coverage (EVERYONE) in a district for the percentage of people served to simply decline over time as populations grow and/or communities are reshaped in terms of settlement patterns. No, success will be the establishment of systems and institutional capacity to continue to extend services to new families and new residents without the continual support of Water For People.

What is a Project?
To do this, we’re redefining the word “project.” Currently, many use the word “project” to represent the up-front training (“capacity building”), planning and infrastructure construction. Various financial mechanisms are used to accomplish this work (grants, loans, etc.). The wreckage of broken water projects and abandoned latrines littering Africa, Asia and Latin America shows us, if nothing else, that this definition of the project, and programming/funding that enables this work to continue, is bankrupt.

Instead, “project” to us means that water is flowing, sanitation is sustained and hands are washed today and in the future. To truly be successful, the project must include all the work needed to implement infrastructure, the actual implementation of infrastructure and the necessary long-term follow-up support to ensure that water keeps flowing, latrines keep being used, hands keep being washed and services grow as new families are formed and settlement patterns change.

Measuring our Success
If we’re not measuring success by how many people we help gain access to water and sanitation on any given day, how will we know when our programs are working? The key indicators for water supply will be water quality, quantity, access, limited system disruption (less than 1 day/month) and finances sufficient to operate, maintain and eventually replace water systems when they age. Sanitation indicators will focus on the hygienic maintenance and use of sanitation systems, and hand washing will be tracked.

This is the basis for our 10-year commitment to monitoring – to ensure skills are applied and institutionalized, to learn from the strategies applied that seem to achieve these outcomes and rethink the strategies that fall short of these goals. Success will be achieved when our support declines over time, and when monitoring continues by local actors without our on-going support.

How We’ll Get There
We know that not only can we not accomplish this task alone, but more importantly, we understand that Water For People operating alone actually undermines the likelihood that the program will be a success. To succeed, we must operate in a way that makes our engagement less important over time while building the involvement of key local actors – government, the local private sector, local civil society and communities.

This means many things – first, Water For People stands by the principle that it should never fully finance water and sanitation investments. Co-finance must come from communities and governments. Water For People continues to develop a wide range of financial mechanisms to meet the challenge of water and sanitation financing, including mixtures of partial grants, microfinance, and strategic financial investments (debt, equity and combinations of all the above) to create the widest range of options available to achieve the goal of sustained full coverage.

Our hope is that EVERYONE becomes a movement, led as much as possible by local, regional and national governments, communities, local enterprises, and local civil society actors. International agencies should support local efforts toward water and sanitation independence, and should work together to achieve the ambitious goals being set locally.

Success is…
When EVERYONE stays covered over time, water and sanitation systems are replaced with locally generated finances over time, people in the regions where we work never need another international water and sanitation agency to address their water and sanitation challenges moving forward, and the idea to program with EVERYONE in mind spreads to other districts/municipalities and even other countries.

We’re All Pieces of the Puzzle, But We Make Up EVERYONE
There are many water and sanitation organizations with a similar mission to improve access to water and sanitation around the world. My hope this that we all operate with the principles of EVERYONE, with the full understanding that we are all small parts in a bigger movement that transcends organizational borders. If we all work together, then we might, just might, actually achieve the goals laid out across the sector in all of our mission statements.