Pumps, Pipes and Promises - Costs, finances and accountability for sustainable WASH services
This year's IRC Symposium is scheduled to take place from 16- 18 November 2010 in The Hague. Bringing together many of the sectors' foremost international experts, the symposium will address issues around:
- the cost of provisioning WASH services
- how to finance WASH Services and
- how to ensure accountability in provision of WASH services
IRC Symposium 2010 - First Announcement
How much does it cost to provide WASH services? How are WASH services financed? And, how can accountability in the provisioning of WASH services be ensured?
By bringing together professionals from across the international WASH sector, this year's IRC Symposium will address these core questions through a series of sessions, debates and papers which will be presented over three days from 16 - 18 November, 2010 in The Hague.
Registration IRC Symposium 2010
Registration information and form for the IRC Symposium 2010: Pumps, Pipes and Promises.
Theme 1: Costs of services
After decades of work, many of us in the sector still do not know how much our interventions actually cost and will cost in the future. Even more worrying, many stakeholders have little idea of the disaggregated or component costs of interventions such as capital infrastructural costs, recurrent O&M costs, capital maintenance, institutional development and capacity building costs. Clearly, there cannot be proper planning and budgeting by local governments, donors and other stakeholders without quantitative data to support – and even drive – these processes.
Theme 2: Financing services
Over recent years a better picture of how money flows in the WASH sector is emerging. But it can still be hard to identify where WASH money comes from (the balance between taxes, tariffs and transfers) and where it goes over time. In countries where the biggest challenges in meeting the MDGs lie, financial requirements exceed by far the available funds in country, but in many cases existing available funds are also not used cost-effectively.
Theme 3: Ensuring accountability
An unrecognised cost of delivering decentralised WASH services is corruption. Recently it has become more widely recognised that the WASH sector has a corruption issue it needs to confront (see Global Corruption Report, Transparency International, 2008). Access to information on sector performance is vital for financial accountability, so is strengthening systems of accountability through promoting citizens or consumer voice type activities.
