Call to give local government the tools and skills to deliver water and sanitation promises

The symposium on strengthening capacity for local governance ended in Delft with a call for the strengthening of local governments in their role of governing the water and sanitation sector. They need strong support structures to fulfill this role. The Symposium on Sustainable Water Supply and Sanitation: Strengthening Capacity for Local Governance was organised by IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre and UNESO-IHE Institute for Water Education in Delft from 26-28 September 2006.

Authority, providers and supporters

In the era of decentralisation, in most countries, local governments hold the responsibility for water and sanitation services provision.

This role needs to be separated from the actual services provision, which can be carried out by local governments itself, or by another entity, e.g. community-based organisations or private sector. A third critical role at intermediate level is the support services function, i.e. the support to be given to the actual services providers. Countries, such as South Africa, actually split these three roles. On the closing day, participants agreed that all three functions need to be enhanced in many countries. They need to look for opportunities in their own regions and countries to press for capacity development.

A closing panel discussion synthesised some of the main issues that had emerged from experiences described during the symposium.

Give local government a chance

Barbara Anton, from ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability, said it was possible to be more specific about the intermediate level and say what was expected in the long term from the public sector, private sector and NGOs. Her vision was that today’s poorest countries should in one or two generations have a very strong local public sector with local government accepting its responsibility to deliver proper WASH services.

“In Europe and North America and everywhere else I personally hope that the public sector is responsible for what is coming out of the tap in my house. If it is not good I would know at which door to knock to make it happen. Institutional development is a lot to do with enabling the public sector to do its job including the participation and dialogue with those local actors.”

Poor track record

Jan Teun Visscher, a consultant on water and sanitation and a former director of IRC, warned against giving local government the role of provider as well as enabler. “I think they have a very poor track record in service provision. I do not think that the connection between local government and the water services should be so entangled. It should be separated and it is separated in many countries.”

Time to develop

Abdul Nashiru from WaterAid, Ghana, said that local government needed to be given enough time to develop. “Centralisation has been the way that countries were run for over a century – with some good results and some bad results. Decentralisation is still very young and we put too much responsibility onto local government. We shared responsibilities and yet we did not share resources. We need to give decentralisation some time and some space.

“Local government are the ones who have the mandate for sustainability and they are closer to the user communities. When there is a problem at community level the first people they turn to is local government – so let’s put all our money there.”

Under-resourced

Leonie Postma, from SNV Angola, agreed that local government is under-resourced for the tasks it has been given. “In Angola they don’t have the capacity to deliver the services they are required to deliver. Decentralisation has taken place but unfortunately it is not decentralisation of resources, but mainly of the roles and responsibilities. Without development of skills and knowledge of those in charge, and without the resources it looks like the system is getting more centralised rather than decentralised.”

Change is very hard

Carol Howe from UNESCO-IHE said there was a need to focus. Her experience from working at the intermediate level was that people needed the skills to persuade upper management and politicians about the need for training and change. “Very often you come back from training very excited about what you want to change, but nobody else cares and change is very hard in an organisation when nobody else is interested.”

Capacity development is more than training

Capacity development does not only mean training. One example given was a regulation in one district that water pump maintenance posts could only go to those who had completed seven years of education, precluding almost all women at village level from taking the post. Amending the regulation would allow women to play a significant role in ensuring a more reliable water supply to their communities.

Focus on institutions

It is not only regulations, it is especially institutions. Jamal Shah from UNICEF Pakistan said that the efforts should focus on institutions at the intermediate level rather than individuals, as most were desperately short of staff and basic equipment, such as computers. “At the intermediate level the staff turnover is too high and people are not there much of the time. There should be more focus on institutional capacity development, so that even if the people change, the capacity will remain.”

Leonie Postma from SNV Angola agreed: “There should be more institutional organisational development - that should be the next step. The other missing aspects are information about the costs involved in capacity development and monitoring the impact of capacity development on the sector.”

Challenges depend on country context

Patrick Moriarty from IRC said: “Capacity development is a very broad area and the challenges are very different depending on context. Particularly we need to become more specific in how we talk about it and realise that there is a huge difference between the intermediate level in a high income country, in a middle income country and in a low income country."

He said that capacity development was too often seen as only skills training, but in low income countries the lack of absolute numbers of engineers, as well as vehicles and supply chains were limiting factors, hereby confirming the point made earlier by Jamal Shah. “To talk about change management in many of the poorest countries at present is pointless. It is not institutional strengthening that is needed but institutional creation.”