Brisbane 2011: Service delivery approach
What constitutes a sustainable service? And what are the benefits of sustainable service delivery approach?
WASHCost Director Catarina Fonseca and Harold Lockwood, Aguaconsult and Triple-S, provided a training on sustainable service delivery and life-cycle costs at the WASH Conference 2011: "Towards sustainability in water, sanitation and hygiene http://www.watercentre.org/wash2011, in Brisbane, Australia, 16 – 20 May 2011.
The training covered general concepts and building blocks for sustainability, and explored approaches and practical tools to improve sustainable water and sanitation services.
Info Sheet Introduction
This sheet gives a short overview of what the WASH Services that Last training entails.
Info sheet introduction FINAL2 PDF.pdf (524.1 kB)
Module 1. Introduction: from systems to services
People expect water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) services to last. However, despite increasing WASH coverage, there is also evidence of high rates of system failure and ‘slippage’, where some users and communities fall back to a lower level of service or have to revert to unsafe and unreliable facilities or practices.
Module 2. Changing the way we do business: the building blocks
Many countries are moving away from a focus on infrastructures towards ensuring continuous services and investment in planning, infrastructure provision monitoring and post-construction support. However, significant gaps and disparities remain. This module is about the approaches and tools used for shifting from an ‘implementation approach’ to a ‘service delivery approach’ (SDA) in order to achieve sustainability in the provision of water and sanitation services.
Module 3. Practical application: tools and methods
One of the key components of ensuring effective and sustained water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) services is life-cycle costing. That means considering all the costs – from capital investment to maintenance, minor and major repairs, direct and indirect support costs and the costs of capital for asset replacement. By costing services rather than infrastructure alone, the life-cycle cost approach is about recognising the importance of post-construction costs which must be covered in order for a service to be maintained over time.
