Concept Paper

1. Introduction

The provision of adequate water and sanitation services is one of the most critical challenges that cities in the world experience now. The urban poor, in particular, face increasing health-related problems due to limited or non-existing access to drinking water, inadequate sanitation and solid waste management. Additionally, the special characteristics and location of low-income urban areas make it essential to consider the interdependency and integrated nature of these services.

The lack of basic urban services affects the human health and dignity of the poor and impairs their economic development and contribution to society. The provision of basic services to the urban poor requires a new paradigm. For the achievement of sustainable solutions, innovative strategies are necessary to incorporate efficient and flexible approaches and to involve the poor, and committed public and private partners. Furthermore, municipalities need to show strong leadership and develop new capacities to address basic urban services provision as a strategy for poverty reduction and environmental improvement.

The traditional provision of basic services often places oversized financial burdens on the already meager incomes of the poor. On the other hand, the privatisation of utilities has frequently concentrated efforts on improving already served and better off areas of the city. Often, this has left citizens of poor areas to find self-initiated alternative solutions to their services provision problems. The role played by the formal private sector in the water and sanitation sectors is frequently recognised and encouraged by national policies and legislation. However, the invisible contribution of the informal private sector has often been neglected and their operations curtailed through unfriendly or disabling policies and regulations. The goal of sustainable basic services requires the empowerment of beneficiaries to own, control and maintain them. Since empowerment is necessarily reflected in sector policies reforms and decentralisation processes, there is a need for a fundamental switch in the roles of the local authorities from providers to facilitators.

Additionally, poor women and men face unequal access, management and decision-making over water resources and sanitation options. This calls for serious efforts to enhance gender mainstreaming in services provision processes -including financing and viable technical options- as well as institutional and management arrangements.

The following sections introduce the Basic Urban Services initiative (BUS) to be implemented in collaboration between the UNCHS SustainableCities and Local Agenda 21 Programmes and the IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre. The BUS initiative intends to develop the capacities of municipalities to plan and deliver basic urban services in un(der)served areas through effective partnerships and will be implemented between 2003 and 2007.

2. The IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre

The IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre has been an active resource centre for the last 35 years. IRC's work focuses on water supply, sanitation and hygiene promotion for the poor segments of society in developing countries. The Centre's main functions are related to knowledge and information management, with emphasis on high quality, easy accessibility and client responsiveness. Next to this, the strengthening of Southern resource centres and networks either by facilitating their establishment and/or their institutional development receives priority attention. These functions are complemented by knowledge development and advocacy on relevant key areas -including scaling up for community management, cost recovery and participatory management tools. With other sector partner organizations in the North and the South, IRC has supported innovative sector approaches including gender mainstreaming, participatory planning and implementation processes, appropriate technology, management strategies for sustainable systems and services and monitoring-for-effectiveness.

3. The Basic Urban Services (BUS) initiative. Main objectives, activities and basic approaches

The Sustainable Cities Programme (SCP) and the Local Agenda 21 Programme (LA21) intend to improve specific assistance on water and sanitation to its municipal partners through the decentralisation of efforts at regional and national levels. Over a period of five years, IRC will lead the Basic Urban Services (BUS) initiative to strengthen the abilities of local governments and their partners. Through BUS, these partners should be enabled to develop strategies and methodologies resulting in effective public private partnerships to improve the provision of basic urban services to the poor. With a focus on poverty reduction, IRC will provide technical advice for the implementation of demonstration projects in six SCP partner cities. The demonstration projects will be followed by a scaling-up process with capacity building, advocacy, improved leveraging of resources and gender responsiveness as main elements of action.

Through alternative approaches such as the Household Centred Environmental Sanitation, BUS will promote integrated processes that enhance ownership, control and management of facilities by the served population. The efforts will also concentrate on supporting income-generating activities in the sector complemented with the identification and lobbying for necessary local or national policy changes.

A combination of training tools and capacity building activities will be shared with the participating municipalities to enhance their capabilities to build partnerships for improved urban services delivery. Similarly, the active networking expected between the national anchoring organisations will support the dissemination of local experiences at regional level. In order to ensure the sustainability of the experience at local level, the strategies described below will be followed.

3.1 Regional Anchoring Strategy

Regional anchoring strategies will ensure the connection between the local and global levels of SCP activities. Representative regional and national capacity building organisations will receive support to strengthen their role as information clearing houses, to develop BUS-focused training activities and programmes, and to facilitate advocacy efforts. An anchoring organisation may play a leading role on some aspects of the planning and management of BUS. However, other local organisations may also have complementary capacities and expertise that should be incorporated at some stage in the initiative. For SCP and LA21 partner cities that have identified basic services as key priorities, anchoring is promoted as a strategy to ensure sustainability and continuity.

The implementation of the BUS initiative could help enhance the anchoring organisation's own capacities and strengthen its institutional development at various levels. The outcomes of the projected demonstration projects and replication initiatives could enhance changes in local or national legislative frameworks and call for increased support from other major programmes and initiatives. In the long-term, this could result in increased benefits for the most vulnerable target population. Additionally, stronger recognition of the work and influence of the anchoring organisation in the water and sanitation sectors may also be a resulting effect.

An anchoring organisation could secure BUS specific activities and methodologies developed through the initiative. For that purpose, the anchoring organisation should be able of providing the necessary institutional commitment and administrative assistance. The selection and appointment of at least six regional or national anchoring organisations will consider the following:

• Institutional flexibility and openness to work with other local organisations that have complementary capacities to the anchoring organisation.
• Capacities for financial leveraging and resource identification to ensure financial sustainability.
• Proven expertise and recognition of its work in the water and sanitation sector at least at national level.
• Institutional mandate and sustainable development plan consistent with BUS proposed principles.

In terms of the specific capacities and expertise of the anchoring organisation, criteria covering the promoted capacity building approaches, its information exchange, knowledge management, networking and partnership building will be used. Equally relevant, the methodologies used for participatory planning and implementation, its advocacy and policy-making interventions and its organisational structure will also be considered for the selection.

On the other hand, the anchoring organisations may need to develop or strengthen certain understanding and skills to fulfil their tasks as planned in the BUS initiative. For that reason, and if necessary IRC is prepared to facilitate certain capacity building and institutional strengthening support in the following areas:

• Information management and brokerage including improved information collection, documentation, case studies development and BUS applied research.
• Project management and methodologies including action plans development, BUS up scaling proposals development, process monitoring, participatory consultations and capacity building for BUS and gender responsiveness in BUS.
• Contents of water and environmental sanitation approaches including application of participatory methodologies, appropriate technology options, monitoring approaches and building up of public private partnerships in the sector.
• Advocacy including improved contacts with global partners and dissemination of IRC advocacy experiences at national and international levels.

3.2 Information and documentation strategy

From the beginning of the BUS initiative, a comprehensive documentation and information sharing strategy will accompany the process. This will ensure the production of appropriate capacity building tools, the adequate documentation of the lessons learned, a regular exchange of ideas and the promotion of alternative channels of information exchange.

Through the implementation of the demonstration projects, BUS expects to generate increased support from other major national and international programmes to complement the initial local mobilisation of resources. Likewise, this process may generate enough interest and support from local partners to get organised and advocate for the improvement of existing policies and legal frameworks. In the medium term, it is foreseen that these advocacy efforts could be translated into specific local/national strategies and plans and physical improvements in BUS.

To fulfil these ambitious goals BUS requires a solid information sharing and documentation strategy. This strategy should be able of capturing all the lessons and experiences learned during the BUS initiative. It should also signal potential factors of success and failure identified from previous experiences and promote the strategic use and versioning of this knowledge by key partners according to their specific contexts, needs and demands.

Local partners are of special interest to the BUS initiative. The initiative recognises that each partner has specific information needs and demands that suit its implementing capacities better. For that reason, one of BUS initial priority activities will be to survey the information needs and capacities of the stakeholders involved in the demonstration projects. Consequently, the way information generated by BUS will be repackaged and further distributed will depend on the level of accessibility and management of different communication media that each stakeholder has. To get relevant information across to this variety of actors, BUS emphasises the consideration of factors of accessibility, readability, content and most adequate format.

The development of strategic partnerships at local level will enhance the use of specific capacities and access to information by the different partners involved. For instance, local officials, managers, researchers and academicians will have information needs that may be answered by the anchoring organisation appropriately. However, when trying to reach the CBOs that represent the ultimate beneficiaries of the actions perhaps a suitable intermediary partner must be used. Proposing, assessing and finding creative solutions to the diverse information needs and demands generated will be a challenge regularly faced by the initiative.

Electronic means such as a webpage, CD-rom, e-conferences, e-learning, community telecentres as well as hard copy documents, presentations, seminars and other traditional means of information sharing will be combined and used according to the capacities, needs and demands of the stakeholders.

3.2.1 The Sourcebook

One of the main products of the documentation strategy is the Sourcebook on "Partnerships for the provision and management of basic urban services". The sourcebook will be produced using the documented information generated from the demonstration projects and additional information from other SCP and LA21 partners active with BUS related activities. The sourcebook is designed as a tool to share the experience beyond the boundaries of the demonstration projects. It is expected to raise awareness and discussion on new strategies to solve BUS related concerns of towns and cities with emphasis on partnerships, income generation and public private involvement. The sourcebook could document among others key elements, methodologies, tools, approaches and areas of advocacy for improved BUS provision, BUS related PPPs and poverty reduction. As important, gender mainstreaming in BUS planning and implementation, anchoring as a strategy for BUS sustainability and replication as a strategy to promote policy change will be considered.

3.2.2 The handbook

The second main product of this strategy is the handbook. The handbook is a technical tool which synthesises the approaches and methodologies proposed by IRC for the demonstration projects. This document will provide the municipality officials in charge of implementing the demonstration projects, with an interesting range of key concepts, basic approaches and examples that could improve their interventions on BUS qualitatively. The document will cover among others: mobilisation of political support, stakeholder participation, issues prioritisation, consensus building, development of action plan, technological options, gender mainstreaming, support for implementation and monitoring.

The handbook will be distributed to selected SCP partner cities to share the knowledge, check its suitability and determine further changes and improvements. In the long-term, it is expected that the handbook could be versioned by the anchoring organisations to suit best the local context and most felt needs.

3.3 The demonstration projects

Cities implementing demonstration projects would have to fulfil certain criteria to ensure the minimum set of conditions required for the execution of the experience. Municipalities as a key stakeholder in the BUS initiative must fulfil very specific criteria determined at political, institutional and operational levels. The criteria proposed ranges from political will and commitment to the process to existing modalities of co-operation with other partners, availability of socio-economic information and information sharing capacities among others. The context outside the municipality is also important and some key criteria regarding other stakeholders must be fulfilled before the demonstration projects can start.

The actual execution of the demonstration projects could cover initiatives related to water supply, stormwater drainage, wastewater collection and treatment, human excreta disposal and solid waste management. The initiative can provide technical advice, facilitate capacity building and learning processes on a limited scale.Direct support for actual implementation is very restricted.For this reason, BUS will pay special attention to engage already existing grassroots initiatives and to build co-operation agreements with active national or international programmes on any of these areas. During the first year of implementation, two fast track projects will start, complemented by four others until the end of the initiative. The geographical coverage of the demonstration projects will consider Africa, Asia and Latin America with priority.

3.4 The up-scaling process

The idea behind the demonstration projects is that they will generate enough interest and support in the approaches proposed as to enable the municipalities and partners involved to start an up-scaling process. The up-scaling process will consider innovative partnerships development and should be integrated within existing poverty alleviation or social development programmes. The anchoring organisations will play a key role developing the capacities of professional teams that could lead the up-scaling process in other cities of the country. It is expected that through the capacity building activities of the anchoring organisations, the knowledge generated by the experience can be institutionalised in regular training courses and capacity building activities.

The financial support from national and international programmes is fundamental for the success of the replication process. The co-ordinated work that can be achieved in the replication process could also help avoid the duplication of efforts at the local level. In the long-term, this level of co-ordination and co-operation is expected to translate in successful policy and regulations changes that would make sustainable access to basic services by the poor a reality.

4. Main risks and assumptions

BUS is an ambitious initiative that promotes the active participation and building of partnerships of a diverse group of stakeholders that do not necessarily work together or co-ordinate actions on a regular basis. This type of co-ordinated action and co-operation expected assumes key support and commitment at political and technocratic levels. These will only be possible with strong and clear leadership from the municipal authorities involved.

Besides, the approaches and methodologies proposed require longer implementation periods than traditional solutions and a different set of abilities that are not acquired in a couple of training sessions. The fundamental attitude changes that this process expects to create are largely dependent on the success of the "learning for change" ethos that can be transmitted and embedded in the participants' working processes.

Another important assumption refers to the stability of the political environment in the demonstration cities that will allow a continuous political support and regular leadership from the municipality during the implementation of the demonstration projects and afterwards during the up-scaling process. BUS assumes that a strong local leadership will be able to champion, motivate and support fully the stakeholders' participation during and after the finalisation of the initiative.

At the moment, the main risk faced by the initiative is that the necessary financial support to go ahead with the up-scaling process does not materialise with the consequent loss of drive generated during the first months of the implementation. This situation could generate frustration at grassroots level and with other partners from the unfulfilled expectations.