Blog - Water Services That Last
This blog aims to regularly report experiences, stories and questions on rural water supply. It will ask questions and provoke debate on how sustainability of water systems can be improved. It seeks to provide examples and learn from failures. It does not aim to provide ready-made answers; if those would exist, they would win the Nobel Prize for Water, or, more likely, the Silver Bullet Award.
We invite you to contribute your thoughts and stories, to provoke and to question, and to share these debates more widely.
Of squeaky wheels and grease – reflections of a social welfarist on the road
08 Jan 13
By Harold Lockwood Recently I have been on a continent-hopping tour through a different range of meetings and events, from which I have seen a pattern emerging, or at least a series of questions in my own mind, as I carry out my work in the WASH sector at an international level. My first engagement [...]
Vida’s story
08 Jan 13
In this clip, Vida Duti tells her personal story and shares the reasons why she decided to work in development. Filed under: Uncategorized
Colombia: decentralisation of WASH project approval to state level
07 Dec 12
The Acueducto Metropolitano de Bucaramanga (AMB) is now the 5th certified state-owned water utility sanctioned by the Colombian government to approve water and sanitation projects. In a press release the housing, cities and land ministry (MVCT) said new legislation approved in 2012 had made this devolution of powers to state-level possible. The ministry said this cuts [...]
Alice in waterland: a fantasy
24 Nov 12
This story is fictional. Any resemblance to real situations or persons is pure coincidence. When Alice stepped through the mirroring water surface into waterland, the first creature she came across was a rabbit, wearing a UN-blue jacket, looking frantically at its watch. “It is nearly time. Only three more years to go till 2015. [...]
Apples and oranges: a comparative assessment in WASH
23 Nov 12
A few weeks ago, an interesting email discussion was held on “water point mapping” D-Group of the Rural Water Supply Network (RWSN). Part of the discussion focused on how much it costs to map or monitor all water systems in a country. Various figures were floating around in the discussion. But when looking at these [...]
Uganda Sector Review 2012: do we still see the forest through the trees?
27 Oct 12
Reblogged from WASH in Uganda: This week 250 practitioners and policy makers from the Uganda Water and Environment sector met for 3 days during the annual Joint Sector Review Meeting. In my previous blog I focused on the challenge of stagnation in rural water: for the past years we haven’t seen any increase in coverage [...]
“A bit more for some” may not be a bad idea
22 Oct 12
Two weeks ago, the “management and support” working group of the RWSN had its first meeting. This meeting focused specifically on management models and support arrangements for piped water supply in small towns. As rural settlements become bigger, a shift is made from point sources – like boreholes with handpumps – to piped systems. This [...]
Piloting and scaling up
22 Oct 12
In this interview, Vida Duti explains how Triple-S Ghana works at all levels in order to move from piloting in the three districts, to scaling-up. Triple-S Ghana has put in several mechanisms to make the leap towards scale work: Meetings with the national level advisory committee: Triple-S gives feedback on its experiences in the districts [...]
Stagnating coverage and functionality in rural water in Uganda: can this nut be cracked?
21 Oct 12
Next week more than 200 practitioners and policy makers from government, civil society, private sector and donors will come together for the annual Joint Water and Environment Sector Review in Uganda to review progress and set-backs during the past year and discuss and decide on priorities for the coming year. For rural water Uganda is [...]
Don’t shoot the messenger, but embrace the sad stats
09 Oct 12
Driven amongst others by the mobile phone applications, more and more statistics are becoming available on the state of water services. These go well beyond the coverage data we were used to in the JMP reports (and which this year gave us some reason to be mildly optimistic). The new stats provide more insight into [...]
