Published on: 26/10/2012
The Costing Sustainable Service training package benefits:
- The ‘casual’ user: NGOs, small charities, donors, students, and ministries interested in the life-cycle costs approach
- The planner: Planners, consultants, researchers adopting the life-cycle based approach and/ or analysis in designing programmes and budgeting tools
- The manager: Managers within large-scale programmes in assuming tasks such as budgeting, implementing, and reporting for water, sanitation and hygiene services that last using the life-cycle costs approach
- The data analyst: Researchers with an interest to learn from data
The training package guides WASH sector professionals in applying the life-cycle costs approach to obtain the following information:
- (relative) magnitude of different costs over time;
- range of costs for different types of infrastructure (e.g., service based on handpumps and shallow boreholes versus gravity-fed spring systems);
- relative weight of different cost components (e.g., capital versus operations and maintenance costs for different types of systems and services over time);
- expected range of costs for different service levels (e.g., maximum, minimum and likely costs);
- number of people who can receive service within a particular budget; and
- the level of water, sanitation or hygiene services that the budget allows.
Users of this training package will also learn what drives the costs of service and how costs change based on factors like population density and hydrogeology. Benchmarking is another skill: users who complete the training will be able to compare cost components across projects, districts, regions or countries so that they can identify cost-effective solutions. Finally, users will learn how to conduct effectiveness analyses for planning improved services—for example, by determining the unit costs used in serving the poor within a district and identifying the gap between ‘designed for’ and ‘received’ quality of service.
