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.
Experimenting with water service delivery
02 Oct 12
By Patrick Moriarty Coming up with a convincing elevator pitch for our Sustainable Services at Scale (Triple-S) project has long been a challenge. Which, given the complexities of the rural water sector itself, is possibly not that surprising. Whether defining ourselves (at least in part) as a complexity informed water services development lab will help, [...]
Multiple-use Water Conflicts
02 Oct 12
By: Seifu Kebede, Taye Alemayehu, Asefa Kumsa and Frank van Steenbergen In the last five years, the development of small scale private irrigation has caught on in Ethiopia. Small, high-value horticultural plots are ‘popping’ up in many parts of the country. Often the new vegetable gardens use water from rural drinking water systems, converting these [...]
Community-based management is dead; long live community-based management
01 Oct 12
Last week, we had our first Triple-S research seminar, discussing the first findings from the assessments of service provision around point sources in Ghana and Uganda. Although I had seen a sneak preview of some of the data, the consolidated results were shocking. After seeing them, I was tempted to declare community-based management (particularly of [...]
FLOWing data
21 Sep 12
By Patrick Moriarty - I mentioned some cool new outputs from IRC’s Ghana programme in my previous post . These factsheets present a rich picture of water services and their governance based on a total survey in our three Triple-S focus districts in Ghana. The fact sheets aren’t cool due to their content – which [...]
Allocation of funds for district level WASH programmes: What is the ideal formula?
19 Sep 12
By Lydia Mirembe and Deirdre Casella in Lira, Uganda - What started off as a commonplace lecture-like meeting in the Lira District Council Hall, ended up in a spirited discussion about a variety of issues around the delivery of water services in a decentralisation framework. Conditional grants for water and sanitation; mobile phones for water; [...]
What does it take to sustain sustainability?
17 Sep 12
As argued several times in this blog, post-construction support is one of the keys to sustainability of rural water supplies. One element of post-construction support is monitoring of aspects such as service levels and the performance of service providers, through which the support providers can better target their assistance. The last few years have seen [...]
Monitoring, learning and adaptation – important lessons from Uganda for development partners
17 Sep 12
By Harold Lockwood - Yesterday I read an excellent report on how the water sector in Uganda has managed to build a truly national monitoring system. The report is written by the Rural Water Supply Network – RWSN – and so naturally focuses on the rural sector as it looks back at the detailed steps [...]
Hitting the right note – the DGIS sustainability clause IS complex – but that’s no excuse for being timid
31 Aug 12
By Patrick Moriarty It’s always difficult call these things, but I think (and hope) that the last couple of weeks may, in retrospect, come to be seen as a watershed on the long and painful road to achieving universal access to water and sanitation services worthy of the name. The potential game changer is the [...]
Team GB puts ‘sports policy’ into practice, but can DfID ‘team WASH’ do the same?
30 Aug 12
By Harlod Lockwood We all know how successful team GB was at the London Olympics with 29 golds and 65 medals overall (London medals). This was a fantastic achievement and the result of years of preparation and putting into practice a comprehensive sports policy for the UK. It wasn’t just investment in the athlete or [...]
IRC debates the pros and cons of a “Sustainability Clause” in donor contracts
24 Aug 12
On the 20th of August the IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre organised an in-house debate on the pros and cons of adding a sustainability clause in contracts between donors and implementers in Water Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) programmes. The background to this is that IRC had been asked by the Netherlands Directorate-General for International [...]
