Taking a livehood-centred approach to domestic water supply

'A livelihood is ...the capabilities, assets and activities required for a means of living. A livelihood is sustainable when it can cope with and recover from stresses and shocks and maintain or enhance its capabilities and assets both now and in the future, while not undermining the natural resource base' (Chambers & Conway, 1992).

This section first introduces and then looks at the implications of taking a livelihoods-based approach to domestic water supply. The following section provides guidelines and tools for applying a livelihoods approach to project appraisal, design and implementation.

Perhaps the greatest value of a livelihoods approach to water supply is that the inherent analytical framework will provide an understanding of the complex ways in which supply improvements have the potential to affect lives. Building on the strengths of poorer groups and households, the facilitation and prioritisation of actions aligned with people's needs are more likely to achieve real impacts on poverty.

The livelihood framework provides a means for stakeholders to engage in constructive debate with development practitioners from diverse backgrounds about the many factors that affect livelihoods, their relative importance and the way they interact. As noted earlier, while we focus on the issue of productive use, there are several other possible implications of taking a livelihoods approach to WATSAN. Users may find that livelihoods analysis has other benefits and takes them in different directions. It may for example reveal strengths and weaknesses in social capital related to conventional system management, or help to identify areas where the performance of external agencies or inhibiting policies need to be changed to improve the sustainability of water supply schemes.

Introduction

The livelihoods approach is centred on an analysis, at the level of the individual or household, of the assets (sometimes known as 'capitals') available to people. From this it broadens out to look at the strategies by which people use their assets, the institutions and policies that can help or hinder them, and the external shocks and trends that can undermine them. An explanation of these concepts is given in Box 8.

It recognises that most people do many things to secure the income, food and other things they desire, and that they have clear strategies to achieve these aims. The focus on assets is closely related to a vision of poverty as a multi-dimensional situation: that you're poor not just because you have no money, but because you have no access to education, or natural resources, or political representation.

A tour round the diagram

Livelihoods approaches are typically represented in one or other versions of (rather complicated looking) diagrams such as that presented below. (See figure 3). All these diagrams aim to place the individual or household at the centre of development planning.

PLAATJE MOET ER NOG IN!!!

The key to understanding the diagrams is to realise that the framework starts from the premise that it is access (or lack of it) to a range of key capitals that lies behind much decision making. These capitals (physical, natural, financial, human, social) include things like labour, water supplies, ownership of water resources, membership of a self-help group or extended family, access to markets, and availability of credit.

The approach captures well how different livelihood activities, based upon the range of assets available, are transformed as part of wider livelihood strategies into livelihood outcomes. Usually people, and poor people in particular, are engaged in several activities, and depend upon a wide mix of assets. The framework draws attention both to the range of factors that influence poor people's livelihoods, and to the complexity and diversity of people's livelihood strategies in a particular place or context. It also captures the vital influences from outside a household, such as the services received from institutions like the law or government departments, the constraints imposed by bureaucracies or corruption, and the impact of shocks, trends and seasonality like drought or macro-economic decline. Droughts may be crucial for example, because at these times the demands on water supply systems are higher due to the additional needs for livestock that cannot find water elsewhere.