Background, activities and outputs of Community Water Plus

Published on: 24/09/2013

Why Community Water Plus

Community management has long been recognised to be critical for rural water supply services delivery. Indeed, community management has contributed significantly to improvements in rural water supplies. However those supplies are only sustainable when communities receive appropriate levels of support from government and other entities in their service delivery tasks. Communities may need easy access to on-demand technical staff from government entities, they may need support from civil society organisations to renew their management structures, and they may need to professionalise, that is outsource certain tasks to specialised individuals or enterprises. These components are the ‘plus’ – the necessary add-ons of community water supply.

Without such support, community management rarely performs well at scale and is then not an appropriate model for sustainable services. In spite of the existence of success stories in community management, and a range of good practices, mechanisms for support and professionalisation have not yet been scaled-up in policies and strategies, leaving these success stories as islands. One possible reason for this widespread gap in community management is that the necessary support comes at a price, and sometimes a significant one. Support does cost governments and donors additional resources in the short-term, but it is likely to deliver better and more sustainable services in the long term. 

Activities

• A scoping study to understand the range of best practices in community management across India, taking note of the range of scale and entities involved.
• Further in-depth study of 18 cases of rural water supply programmes with a high degree of community management to assess their degree of success and identify supporting factors in the environment. The success will be measured in different ways:
  • The level of community management - we start from the premise that community empowerment is an important feature in itself, and that the degree to which communities are managing their own services is a reflection of that empowerment.
  • Service levels - what ultimately determines success is the level of service, understood to mean the quantity, quality, reliability and accessibility of the water that users get, and the degree of equity.
  • Performance of the service provider - community-based organisations are fulfilling functions of a service provider, particularly operation and maintenance and administration. 

Expected outputs

• Series of policy briefs with the highlight findings of the research and policy implications
• Series of working papers describing the research methodology and findings
• A set of 18 case studies with an assessment of the success of each 
• An assessment report on the successful models for management and support to rural water supply in India
• Guideline document with proposed categories of management models and support entities fit to different contexts in India and guidance for trajectories for their development
• Inputs into national and state-level capacity building programmes based on research findings

For more information, contact:  Dr Kurian Baby, Co-Director Stakeholder Engagement and Communications 

The research has been funded by AusAID through the AusAID Development Awards Research Scheme under an award titled Community Management of Rural Water Supply Systems in India.

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