IRC Symposium challenges WASH sector to focus on services

The IRC 2010 international symposium has posed a series of challenges to the water and sanitation sector to improve its ability to cost and finance sustainable services – and to understand the price that communities pay when those services fail.

The symposium, Pumps, Pipes and Promises held in the Hague from 16-18 November brought together 120 researchers, practitioners, economists, engineers and governance specialists from 27 countries to draw together three critical strands that are usually tackled in isolation – costs, financing and accountability.

It was strongly supported, with 40 papers written and presented by staff from UNICEF, WaterAid, Plan, Water and Sanitation Program, Transparency International and many other key sector organisations. The first preliminary results from the WASHCost project to identify costs in four countries were released in a series of papers from the project.

Sustainable services is the aim

The overall aim was to focus on the need to switch from occasionally providing people with infrastructure, such as pumps and toilets, to providing sustainable services in water, sanitation and hygiene.

Life-cycle costs include maintenance and support costs

The challenge is to start making decisions based on full life-cycle costs rather than just capital investment costs – especially the missing elements for maintenance and for direct support to keep services running. It means understanding costs in the context of the level of services provided – without which such cost data are meaningless.  There is much less understanding of sanitation and hygiene costs than for water – but it is clear from the preliminary findings of the WASHCost research project that many households bear the majority of these costs themselves.

The high level of support needed to keep community services running in rural areas was underlined by detailed figures from two municipalities in South Africa where the costs for technical support represented between a half and two thirds of the total operational costs for water services – and where repairs to pumps were often beyond the capacity of village based CBOs.

There was a widespread welcome at the symposium for some of the methodologies for collecting costs and the cost data revealed there. However, there is also an understanding of the need for methodologies and key messages to be documented and communicated effectively, with training available to spread these skills.

Finance - who pays for what?

All finance comes from taxes, tariffs or transfers (such as ODA) but there is little agreement at international or national level about who should pay for what. Keynote speaker, David Hall, Director of the Public Services International Research Unit, argued that the main provider of finance is and will continue to be the Governments of developing countries themselves. He said that aid should be redirected to support countries that have low tax revenues, and that the private sector has little role to play in financing water and sanitation services in low income countries. 

One area in the spotlight was the failure of community management to provide a mechanism to save money to deal with more substantial maintenance, in a context where a US$ 50,000 borehole often fails because the US$ 500 handpump cannot be replaced. Patrick Moriarty of IRC, in the closing synthesis report, said that communities could not be expected to keep enough reserves for larger scale repairs and capital maintenance.  Alternative mechanisms, such as some form of mutualisation, are needed to spread the risks.

Accountability gives citizens the right to challenge abuses

There was a consensus that corruption needs to be tackled wherever it occurs. However, there was also a consensus that the best way to achieve this was by proactive measures to improve transparency and accountability – with effective regulatory bodies, and especially by providing citizens with accessible information, so they can challenge any misuse of funds and resources. Without transparency, accountability, and improved access to information, then costs data on its own is unlikely to lead to improved outcomes.

The challenge for the WASH sector to move from infrastructure development to service delivery was set out in the Symposium background paper, which says: “In many cases, available funds are not used cost-effectively and not accounted for properly.” The paper (Pezon, Fonseca & Butterworth, 2010) points out that costs are not currently a significant factor in sector decision making and that planning is not linked to real budgeting or finance flows.

Decentralisation has the potential to build a stronger link between citizens and their services. “However, administrative capacities and checks and balances are also generally less developed at this level, and the dangers of corruption taking root within newly decentralised service delivery arrangements have been highlighted.”

Funding for the longer term

Amongst the questions posed in the background paper were, what is the most cost effective scale for different levels of service, who should be accountable for post-construction support and costs and how long-term costs should be handled when funding and contracts for service providers are short term.

Symposium combined research and practical experience

The symposium was hailed as a success by organisers and participants. Symposium organiser and facilitator, Alana Potter from IRC, said: “What‘s exciting is that we are starting to see the synthesis of three critical ideas in terms of costs, accountability and financing, which are often seen as particular disciplines in themselves.  We are starting to see more interdisciplinary sharing and the synergies starting to emerge between those three content areas.

“People have contributed their expertise from distinct areas of research and practical experience. It gives us the opportunity to look at the cross cutting issues within the context of sector wide approaches, decentralisation and general institutional reforms in various countries across the world.

“I think a lot of findings coming out of WASHCost with respect to the kinds of investments households are making in water and sanitation improvement but also in hygiene, show that these are orders of magnitude higher in terms of capita payments than the public sector investment in hygiene improvement. Finding out how many people in poor countries across the world are investing huge amounts of money, effort and time in improving their lives is I think interesting for people outside the sector to know.”

Symposium participants did not clear up every question. But there is a clear movement towards a consensus on the need for greater clarity on costs and financing and how to ensure accountability. In his closing preliminary synthesis, Patrick Moriarty called for greater communication between sector organisations to share data and break down barriers. He also pointed to the need to develop and document approaches and tools for life-cycle costing, monitoring costs and service delivery and to ensure accountability.

Peter McIntyre

Reference:

Pezon, C., Fonseca, F., & Butterworth, J., 2010. Background Paper: Costs, Finances and Accountability for Sustainable WASH services in IRC Pumps, Pipes and Promises collected papers.