Summary and conclusions

Updated - Tuesday 28 October 2003

Domestic water services have multiple benefits - it is the combination of these that add up to an appreciable impact on livelihoods and poverty.

Narrow approaches to water supply, that neglect productive uses of domestic water, are an opportunity missed. Worse still, because in practice people will use water for productive activities, failure to account for this additional demand at the design stage may well lead to system failure. It is therefore much better to include small scale productive use in initial system planning and design.

A major reason for neglecting these needs is that they slip between sectors. A sectoral approach where irrigation, industrial, and domestic water supplies are treated separately, frequently fails in rural areas. Projects implemented within these rigid boundaries usually don't recognise multiple benefits and therefore don't meet demands, particularly those of poor people.

Low and inflexible norms-based 'basic needs' or rights based approaches can also be a handicap - they fail to provide for the very productive activities that could help people grow food, make money, and escape poverty. These uses should also be considered as basic. Norms are required for proper planning, but they should be based on at least some productive use, and should in any case act as benchmarks, not upper limits.

Many positive examples are now emerging of how better water supplies do impact on livelihoods and poverty. This is good news, but they need to be supplemented and reported more widely. While research findings are now strong, there are no models or toolkits that build on the capabilities and address the wider needs of people for multi-purpose water supplies. In addition, examples reported tend to be project and location specific, and have not yet been taken to scale.

Monitoring indicators in particular need to be expanded to capture the full range of benefits of improved water supplies to vulnerable women and children and other marginalised groups.

Livelihood approaches provide a useful way forward for the WATSAN sector, supporting it in broadening its focus, addressing needs for productive water use, and improving its poverty reduction aims and potential. In addition they offer potential for better application of WATSAN specific initiatives such as demand responsive approaches and cost-recovery.

There is a genuine increase in recognition, across the water sub-sectors, of the need for a holistic approach to meeting people's water needs at household level, and there is some convergence between sectors. In particular, the irrigation sector is starting to recognise multiple users of 'irrigation' water. These trends are encouraging evidence of a more integrated approach to water resource development and management.

Livelihoods based approaches to developing water resources offer a potential justification of, and incentive to, genuinely bottom up Integrated Water Resource Management. They also provide a challenge to all those who claim to target or represent the largely poor and scattered small scale users of water: to include their demands within rights based approaches, to ensure that their voice is heard at the catchment management table, and to ensure that they get a fair share of the water pie.