Introduction

"Water Supplies Managed by Rural Communities"
Country reports and case studies from Cameroon, Colombia, Guatemala, Kenya, Nepal and Pakistan

There is a growing trend in most countries in the South to encourage rural communities to manage their own water supply schemes. Governments are trying to change their role from 'provider' to 'facilitator', and External Support Agencies (ESAs) promote decentralization and greater community involvement in decision making and management.

However, both agencies and communities face numerous constraints. In practice, little emphasis is put on developing management capacities at the local level. The agencies are more focused on construction of water supply systems, whereas the communities often lack management experience and the tools to deal properly with operation and maintenance.

Despite certain weaknesses, however, these studies reveal a significant potential for community-based management. There are several advantages to supporting a more prominent role for the communities themselves: greater efficiency in system performance; improved cost-effectiveness for both communities and agencies; and better prospects for the long-term sustainability of water supply systems.

What are the main obstacles preventing communities from enjoying full benefit from their water supply systems? Problems include: insufficient management capacity, lack of effective and equitable financing systems, and the absence of suitable equipment and infrastructure for operation and maintenance, environmental degradation of watersheds, and inattention to a proper gender balance.

Experience also shows that much could be achieved by building on the traditional patterns of water management at the local level. Water collection and use are often regulated by explicit or implicit agreements, many of which are made by the women. Although they may have long played a crucial role in the management of traditional water sources, their talents have been underutilized. Provided they are neither overburdened with domestic work nor excluded from the decision-making process, women could play a vastly expanded role in managing water supply systems. Work, functions, authority and training should be divided between men and women in a balanced way.

Community management does not imply that communities must take care of everything or pay the full cost themselves. The idea of partnership allows scope for sharing responsibilities between supporting agencies and communities. The exact division can vary considerably, but should be agreed upon in advance.

At present many agencies and communities are struggling together to find solutions for proper water supply systems. The IRC research project on Community Management of Rural Water Supply Systems offers one approach. It engages local men and women in selected communities in a joint action to identify, develop and test new strategies and tools for improving water systems.

The twenty-four communities selected in the research project already have functioning and self-managed water supply systems and service levels of various types, and represent a range of environmental, socio-economic and cultural conditions as well as variations in managerial performance. Because the communities have been selected as being representative of different types of water supply as well as local management conditions, the participating organizations should be able to apply this experience to other water programmes.

To this end each team has established a programme for sharing its work, not only within their own organization, but also with a national group of other agencies dealing with community management of rural water supplies in their country. An international advisory group gives inputs to the project and helps disseminate the project's results on a wide scale.

Together, the process and results of this action research will improve our understanding of what comprehensive, gender sensitive community management of local resources and domestic water supply can achieve, and which agency approaches and tools can best help rural communities and their local water management organizations to obtain and preserve an effective water supply service. Future publications will report on those experiences.