Every local government faces its own WASH challenges within in its own context. It is important to understand the WASH status quo and challenges in your area in order to improve WASH governance and sustainability.
Published on: 09/11/2011
Every local government faces its own WASH challenges within in its own context. It is important to understand the WASH status quo and challenges in your area in order to improve WASH governance and sustainability. Challenges often relate to infrastructure backlogs, addressing difficulties related to remote rural areas and informal settlements, reducing costs, ensuring financial sustainability, and ensuring the necessary institutional capacity to provide sustainable WASH services. Often the most difficult challenge is all the WASH decisions that need to be made for your locality, for example: what service levels to provide, what tariffs to charge, who should operate and maintain the services, which communities should be prioritise for new infrastructure, how much money should be allocated to maintenance, and so on. Locality is the area of jurisdiction of the local government entity.
Before you can make any of these decisions you need to know your local area and the challenges within your area. For example, you need to know who your customers are, what level of services they require and what they can afford to pay for water and sanitation services. You also need to know what water resources are available, who has access to infrastructure and whether the infrastructure is operating and being maintained. Financial sustainability is crucial for WASH sustainability. What are your total operating costs, how much revenue are you collecting from the sale of water, what subsidies are needed and is your overall service running at a loss or is the income enough to cover all the costs? There are many issues around which you need status quo information for your locality.
The purpose of this module is to ensure that participants relate the WASH training to their own locality, context and WASH challenges. Throughout the WASH governance training programme participants will be asked to provide examples and to apply WASH concepts, approaches and mythologies to their own challenges. This module therefore lays the basis for contextualising local conditions so that all the modules have practical application to the local conditions of the participants.
By the end of this module participants will have:
Participants should have knowledge on the issues listed below. Where possible and available they should bring this information to the training. Some of the actual information may not be readily available however it is important for participants to engage with relevant officials within local government to gain at least a broad overview of the issues listed.
| Module | Information required |
| Module Two WASH services in your locality |
Participants should broadly have knowledge of these issues (if the information is available) |
This module is designed for one day comprising 6 hours of session time and 2 hours for lunch and tea breaks.
|
| Session title | Time |
| Session 1 | WASH status quo in your locality | 90 minutes |
| Session 2 | WASH who’s who | 90 minutes |
| Session 3 | WASH challenges in your locality | 90 minutes |
| Session 4 | WASH strategies and solutions | 90 minutes |
The detailed session plan is included in downloadable Facilitator's Notes (below).
Presentations:
