IRC is starting a new, six-year Sustainable Services at Scale project

Providing sustainable water services to the rural poor is one of the most important, difficult and neglected areas of the sector. At the heart of this failure lies the lack of clearly shared understanding of what defines a sustainable water service by those involved in rural service provision. Strange as it may sound, the reality is that in many developing countries there is no commonly shared understanding of what a rural water service looks like, how it should be provided, or who is accountable for its provision.

IRC is starting a new, six-year Sustainable Services at Scale (Triple S) project, which will identify, develop and test decentralised models for the delivery of sustainable rural water services in two developing countries.

Paradigm change needed

The project is predicated on the need to bring about a fundamental paradigm change in how rural water services are delivered:

• From project based, one-off construction of water systems to delivering indefinitely sustainable rural water services;
• From ad-hoc project implementation in villages to planning and delivery of services across entire districts;
• From uncoordinated delivery by different agencies of often widely differing service levels and approaches to harmonized and coordinated service delivery within a commonly agreed model.

We call this new paradigm a Service Delivery Approach for enabling the sustainable scaling up of water services. This requires development of a specific Service Delivery Model to apply the approach in each country context.

In each country, national and district-level learning alliances of existing stakeholders (such as governments, politicians, donors, NGOs, private companies) will be formed to develop and learn from implementing the service delivery models and to enable their replication.

Target: 2,5 million people

The project expects to directly benefit a total population of rural users of around 2.5 million people. It will also provide training to approximately 400 water sector professionals from local government, the private sector and NGOs in improving water service delivery in rural areas. The four local partner organisations that will become part of the project will also receive significant capacity building and organisation strengthening training. This will include core technical areas of rural water supply, project management and impact assessment.

The project will use a range of research, learning, communication and behaviour change approaches, with the aim of identifying and demonstrating new service delivery models. It also aims to create the necessary enthusiasm and buy-in to ensure that they are taken up, sustained and replicated.

The project will start in December 2008, has an overall budget in the region of US$22 million, and has a duration of six years with the inclusion of an eighteen month inception phase part of which will be the identification of the initial two countries for project execution. The project will be implemented by an international team of 6-8 professionals based in the Netherlands as part of IRC together with local teams of 10-12 professionals based in partner organisations in the countries.