Title | Scaling up community management of rural water supply |
Publication Type | Miscellaneous |
Year of Publication | 2004 |
Authors | Lockwood, H |
Secondary Title | Thematic overview paper / IRC |
Pagination | vi, 91 p.; 54 refs.; 18 boxes; 1 fig. |
Date Published | 2004-03-01 |
Publisher | IRC |
Place Published | Delft, The Netherlands |
Keywords | access to water, millennium development goals, rural areas, safe water supply, scaling up, water supply |
Abstract |
Among the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for the year 2015 is a commitment to “reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe water”. There is little doubt that community management will be the predominant model for those striving to reach that goal by bringing sustainable water supplies to hundreds of millions of rural people in the next twelve years. Two decades of experience with participatory approaches, decentralization, cost sharing and technological adaptation mean that donors, NGOs and national governments have all the evidence they need that demand-driven community-led approaches delivers better results than the supply-driven government-led models that prevailed up to the 1980s. There remains a place for public and private utilities to deliver rural water supplies in the right circumstances, but it is community-managed systems that will best meet the needs of the vast majority. Knowing the right way forward is one thing, but achieving the rate of progress needed is |
Custom 1 | 205.2 |