Supporting water sanitationand hygiene services for life

2014 WASH Sustainability Forum

30 June – 1 July 2014

Water: Tools and Approaches for Sustainability

Stef Smits, José Gesti Canuto and Cecilia Scharp

Defining sustainability for water supply

• Whether water continues to flow over time, and whether it continues to provide an agreed level of service

• Systems may need to be replaced at the end of their life time, but services should be forever

Two broad approaches to sustainability1. Groups of factors (dimensions) that affect likelihood of sustainability:

• Social

• Technical

• Environmental

• Institutional

• Financial

• Health

• Mainly at community level, but increasingly at other institutional levels

• Seek to be predictive: if all factors in all dimensions are in place, services are likely to be sustainability

Two broad approaches to sustainability

2. Snapshot of performance in service delivery

- Sustainability manifests itself through level of service to the user (whether water flows and with what characteristics

- Depending on performance in service delivery by:

- Service provider, responsible for daily operation, maintenance and administration

- Service authority, responsible for planning, coordination, support and oversight roles (typically local government)

- Enabling environment

- Snapshot of current situation, as basis for inferences towards the future

- Explicit recognition that sustainability depends on factors at different institutional levels

Four broad group of tools

• Tools to assess sustainability in comprehensive manner, covering all (or most) dimensions

– Mainly in use for assessments, monitoring and evaluation

• Tools that zoom into one specific dimension,

– More oriented towards identifying actions within that dimension

• Tools to comprehensively assess service delivery performance, covering all levels

– Identifying what bottlenecks are at different institutional levels

• Tools to assess performance at a single institutional level

– Identifying structural improvement or reform at that level

Challenges and gaps

Being comprehensive

Challenges and gaps

Challenges and gaps

Keeping it simple

Challenges and gaps

• Sustainability just depends on many factors, at different institutional levels, and often are interrelated

• But is data on all of these reliably available?

• Do we know the exact interaction between them

• Making sense out of many data to identify bottlenecks and priorities: generation of alerts

Being comprehensi

ve

Keeping it

simple

The big picture?

Or zooming in?

Challenges and gaps

• Tools zooming in at a particular dimension or level, may yield more actionable results

• But may forget links to other factors, levels and dimensions

• Complementarity between tools

Challenges and gaps

• Utility of tools depends on institutional capacity to use them

• Therefore need to be commensurate with that institutional capacity

Agenda

Key questions for discussion

What are the design principles when developing sustainability tools – possible issues

− Levels and dimensions of sustainability

− Scoring and aggregating

− Evidence that they work

− Qualitative and quantitative:

What is needed to make the tools contribute to sustainability?

− Complementarity between tools

− Contribution to sector change

− Government leadership

− Balance between diversity and standardization of tools

Enjoy the flow