Symposium papers and presentations

Thematically-organised abstracts, papers and presentations presented at the IRC symposium ‘ Pumps, Pipes and Promises: Costs, Finances and Accountability for Sustainable WASH Services' in The Hague, The Netherlands from 16 - 18 November 2010.

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. Here you can find all the papers from the accountability theme at IRC's 2010 symposium Pumps, Pipes and Promises.