How can WASH services be built to last? This critical question for sustainable services will be given a special focus in the four Source feature issues planned for 2011. In each issue we will publish stories that will be tagged as “WASH services that last”.
Published on: 17/03/2011
How can WASH services be built to last? This critical question for sustainable services will be given a special focus in the four Source feature issues planned for 2011. In each issue we will publish stories that will be tagged as “WASH services that last”.
In this issue of Source Bulletin, three articles highlight outputs and lessons from the two major programmes WASHCost and Triple-S that are funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation:
• Quotes highlighting the links in the chain for sustainable services, a photo story from Ghana. Nick Dickinson spent two months recently in Ghana assisting the process documentation work of IRC and WASHCost teams there and he worked with photographer Peter DiCampo on a photo story to highlight the governance issues involved in securing water services.
• Ensuring rural water services that last: lessons from a 13-country study, by Sarah Carriger, who highlights lessons from a recently completed 13-country study to identify factors that contribute to, or constrain, the delivery of sustainable rural water services at scale. Sarah is providing communication support to the Triple-S project.
• The need to pull together key data and methodology and sell it to decision makers in donor organisations and government was one of the central messages to emerge from the IRC Symposium, Pumps, Pipes and Promises in November 2010. A round-up report from Peter McIntyre highlights the high cost of failed services and the way in which households have to pick up the pieces themselves.
The Triple-S study found a critical lack of life-cycle costing for capital investment, minor and major repairs, direct and indirect support costs and the costs of capital for asset replacement. Even in the USA, rural water service providers must tap soft loans and grants to cover major repairs and replacements.
While three quarters of the total cost of meeting the MDG water and sanitation target is needed for maintaining and replacing existing structures, only 13% of current funding for water and sanitation from eight major donor agencies is in fact earmarked for this.
Chief editor Dick de Jong
