By Susan Davis, Executive Director, Improve International

The big picture

I just watched this great animated video by IRC that simply explains the concept of life cycle costs for water systems:The first minute of the video depicts a common practice where a development organization (NGO A) installs a water system. When it breaks, no-one can fix it.  After a while, another development organization (NGO B) comes in and installs another water system, or fixes (rehabilitates) the old one.  Rehabilitating a system is often very inexpensive and thus is quite popular in large programs.  For example, a colleague told me that 68% of the systems in a large multi-country program were rehabilitations.

The true story

Put the donor’s phone number here (Photo credit: Marla Smith-Nilson)

This video reminded me of a recent conversation over lunch with a friend who is a fundraiser for a development organization (let’s call them NGO B).  She told me about a donor who recently supported a project to rehabilitate two boreholes in Kenya.  “He is very rigorous,” she said.  The donor was asking questions about how NGO B knew that the boreholes wouldn’t fail again in the future.  He asked whether NGO B would continue to monitor the water services provided by these boreholes into the future.  NGO B said “We can only do that if you give us money to monitor over time.”  My friend didn’t mention whether they gave a cost estimate for services monitoring, but said the NGO B staff in Kenya didn’t really want to encourage this; because what if they moved to a new area, and it was difficult to get to the boreholes to monitor them?  The donor still gave the funds.  I suggested that NGO B could give the donor’s name and address to the community, so they could let him know if they were still getting water services. She laughed.

The imaginary conversation

Here’s how I imagine the conversation went with this donor:

Donor:  I’m happy to help people get safe water, but I’m curious: why did the boreholes fail?
NGO B: Because the other organization who built them did not train the community to maintain the handpump / or there were no spare parts available / or there was no money to pay for the repairs.

Donor: Why didn’t the first development organization fix the problem?
NGO B: They probably didn’t know about it.  If they did know about it, they probably would say that to fix those systems would be encouraging dependency in the community.

Donor: In that case, wouldn’t my funding your rehabilitation of these boreholes count as encouraging dependency?
NGO B: [Silence]

Donor: Why didn’t the community fix it?
NGO B: They didn’t have ownership and/or the skills to fix the problem.

Donor: Why didn’t the local government entity help them?
NGO B: They considered it the problem of the development organization.

Donor: I’m not feeling so great about this.  Have you done “rehabilitations” like this before?
NGO B: Yes, lots. Trust us.  

Donor: And are all those systems still working?
NGO B: Oh we don’t know.  We don’t have money to do monitoring after the projects end. But trust us, we know what we’re doing. We do lots of rehabilitations.

Donor: Well, what if I gave you money to do that monitoring?
NGO B: Well, trust us, we think your money would be better spent on providing access to people who need safe water.

Donor: But how do you know that they will continue to have safe water?
NGO B: [looking hurt] Don’t you trust us?

Donor: Okay, here’s a check.
NGO B: [celebration]

I suppose this donor, who owns a large successful business, decided to just trust the organization.  The NGO didn’t give him many options. But I wonder if learning about the failure statistics for water systems would cure his addiction to trust?

This is just for fun: a collection of water drop logos, with one little surprise. All of these are logos for real organizations or events.

This is not intended to be an endorsement of any organization.

By Susan Davis, Improve International

At the IRC Symposium on Monitoring for Sustainable Services, I was excited to see there were several presentations on sustainability checks for water and sanitation systems.  The sustainability frameworks contain various combinations of factors including financial, management, institutional / policy, technical, environmental, and community / social.

I think the sector has spent enough time and money reviewing the literature for sustainability factors and developing frameworks and monitoring indicators. Now we all need to apply them to actual water systems, with evaluations years after their construction. And we should build in these principles to our programming from now on. Here are some of the frameworks that I’ve collected.

• Water for Life Sustainability Rating Criteria. Water 1st & Improve International. Presentation here.
• Applying Sustainability Analysis to Rural Water Services. UNICEF Eastern & Southern Africa
• Sustainability checks: Five year annual sustainability audits of the water supply and ODF status in the One Million Initiative, Mozambique. UNICEF
• Advancing Sustainability of WASH Services within USAID. USAID
• Sustainability check: An innovative approach to WASH sustainability monitoring. USAID & Rotary
• Research exploring community-managed water and services. CARE / Global Water Initiative
• Assessing the Sustainability of WASH Services. Helvetas
• Sustainability Framework. WaterAid
• Sustainability Monitoring Framework. Dutch WASH Alliance.
• WASHTech
• WASH Sustainability Charter

There seems to be general consensus among those participating in the conversation that at a minimum, for a water system to deliver services, someone must operate and maintain it, and sufficient funds must be available to pay for those activities.

I’m here to support your services (photo credit: Susan Davis 2012)

If something goes wrong with your toilet or your sink, who do you call?  Unless you are pretty handy, you call a plumber, and you pay the plumber.  Similarly, the concept of services support, also known post construction support (PCS) recognizes that a rural community water committee might not be able to deal with all possible situations that affect its water point/system or toilets no matter how well trained they are.

Community management has been built into many water programs since the 1990s, but in the 2000s concerns arose about the ability of rural communities to manage systems without support like follow-up training or expert advice. Combine this with the fact that up until recently, there was very little broad scale information on how much it cost to operate and maintain rural water systems around the world.

What types of post-construction support are typically provided?  In a study of water systems in Bolivia, Peru, and Ghana the following activities were provided.

Interestingly, this same study found: no association between a village receiving a technical PCS visit (to help with repairs or maintenance) and having a working water system. However, post-construction technical training of system operators or caretakers was positively associated with system performance in both Ghana and Bolivia (Whittington et al 2008).

Stef Smits of IRC shared results of the Triple-S initiative in a blog a few months ago, saying “community-based management is dead,” maybe. Perhaps it could work for piped water systems, but not for single water points, but we need to question the underlying assumptions and acknowledge the evidence on actual demand for water. In another blog, Smits points out that it doesn’t make much sense to develop monitoring systems if the responsibility for post-construction support is not clearly defined, because there is little incentive for service providers to provide data and no capacity to use the data.

A new brief from Water & Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP) suggests we stop distinguishing between community management and private sector management and think of hybrid models to get the best of both worlds (WSUP 2013). Their recommendations to program managers include:

• Influence the sector to support innovative approaches
• Address financial viability as a core priority
• Foster significant stakeholder involvement early in the discussion
• Set appropriate incentives for all role players
• Use words that are appropriate and understood in the local context – guardian, manager, social entrepreneur

You say it’s 101 [basic] but I say it’s still not being implemented.

My friend Bekele Abaire from CRS Ethiopia said this to another colleague who complained that a conference presentation on sanitation & hygiene monitoring was too basic.

Reblogged from water services that last:

As I sat in a seminar about Menstrual Hygiene Management in Schools at Emory University earlier this week, I kept thinking about my trip to Vietnam to visit CARE’s projects.  As we drove all over the beautiful country, my fellow travelers and I marveled at the flocks of school girls walking or biking along the side of the road in their pristine white school uniforms (called ao dai, see photos here).  We thought it would be hard to keep the uniforms clean because of the dirt on the side of the road, but we didn’t think about problems they might have managing their periods.

Most women know the fear and embarrassment of visible blood stains on their clothes. For many girls in developing countries, the implications of not being able to deal with “the curse” are much worse. As a fellow female, I’m ashamed that I haven’t focused on how important it is for girls to be able to better manage their periods so that they can stay in school and pay attention while there.

Fortunately, other people are bringing more clarity and the power of evidence to this issue.  Bethany Caruso and her team at the Center for Global Safe Water at Emory University collaborated with UNICEF to look at the challenges girls face in menstrual hygiene management in three countries (see an overview of the program here)  In the Philippines, Bolivia, and Rwanda girls face similar challenges:

• Fear, shame and teasing from boys
• Lack of information
• Lack of access to pads (many girls use rags)
• Inadequate or no school toilets

All of these can lead to girls skipping school or being distracted while in class,  unplanned pregnancies, and infections.

There are a variety of unrelated factors that lead to these challenges, but the water, sanitation, and hygiene sector could help by making sure that girls’ toilet facilities are private and girl-friendly (which might mean they are far from boys’ toilets, have locking doors, more space, mirrors and sinks inside, and contain covered trash cans for bloody toilet paper or incinerators for used pads).  Training of teachers and girls on how to use the facilities is also important.

“Gender equity” has been a buzz-phrase in recent years, but as Bethany said, “instead of equity of inputs, we need to think about equity of outcomes.”  To achieve better health and educational outcomes for girls, the water, sanitation and hygiene sector must consider its role in addressing these important findings.

Related resources

Celebrating Womanhood: Menstrual Hygiene Management report

TED Talk. Arunachalam Muruganantham: “How I started a sanitary napkin revolution!”

Last week I went to the Sustainable WASH Forum and Donor Dialogues in DC. A theme of the conversations was roles and responsibilities, especially the roles of governments.  One interesting debate was about who should be responsible for monitoring.  Some said that governments should be solely responsible. There are some governments who are leading the way on this, but I and others believe that this doesn’t mean that development organizations shouldn’t also be accountable for their own work.  If an organization visits water and toilet systems for years after they are built, they can learn from their successes and failures and make their future work better.

Since many organizations only do monitoring & evaluation (M&E) during development programs (see my thoughts after the Learn MandE conference), I think we need to use a new term like “services monitoring” to refer to the need for a way of confirming that water and sanitation services are still available to people.

Why is service monitoring important?

Each year the United Nations highlights a theme for the year in water. Last year it was “Water & Food Security;” this year it’s “Water Cooperation.”  But I think we should acknowledge the “Years of Magical Thinking.”

I recently read Joan Didion’s memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking” about her struggles to deal with the death of her husband.  It was striking and sad. One example of magical thinking is that if a person doesn’t let the messenger into her house, he cannot deliver the horrible news.  This made me think of decades of magical thinking we have collectively endured in the water and sanitation sector. As long as we don’t let the bad news about failures get personal, we don’t have to acknowledge our roles in solving the problems.

At conference after conference, speakers lament the “sustainability problem.” They quote failure statistics and talk about the need for research and best practices.  And yet, the way we do business hasn’t changed much.  This is either magical thinking or, according to Einstein, insanity (Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.)

In program after program, development organizations think:

“If we build this water system, it will last.”

“If we build this latrine, people will use it and replace it when the pit is full.”

If we put handwashing stations at a school, the teachers will make sure there is soap.”

“If we set up water committees, they will make sure that people pay and that the system is maintained.”

“If we build this system, the government will replace it when the time comes.”

“If we give families a water filter, they will know how to clean it/replace it.”

And yet, evidence shows this is often not the case (see Sad Stats).  On a site visit last year, I saw a new water system that was replacing (or intended to supplement) a system built by the government.  According to the community, the government system lasted for 20 years but it wasn’t maintained by the government or the community.  When it finally broke down completely, nobody had funds or felt responsible to replace the system.  This is not the first time I’ve heard a similar story.

Here are some ideas for practical thinking:

1. Look back at what you’ve done and build on what works; fix what’s not working.
2. Get real: Development organizations and donors need to have some hard conversations with the communities and the appropriate government agencies before any money is committed and definitely before anything is built.  External funds can be a strong point of leverage but they can also let people off the hook.
3. Remember why we’re doing this. If we really want to help people have safe water services for life, we need to work smarter.

And let’s save the magical thinking for the things we really can’t do anything about.

In an earlier blog I wrote about the confusion on how we should estimate how many people lack access to water.  A recent article by the UNC Water Institute (full disclosure: I could only read the abstract without paying for the article) suggests some rather shitty numbers:

We estimate that in 2010, 40% of the global population (2.8 billion people) used improved sanitation, as opposed to the estimate of 62% (4.3 billion people) from the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP), and that 4.1 billion people lacked access to an improved sanitation facility.

The abstract also shares this sunny yet horrifying cartoon that shows the direct line from untreated sewerage (poop) to people’s drinking water:

The very bad news

So, this is yet another reason to rethink how we frame the global development goals.  You, yes you, can vote on the changes that would make the most difference to you in the world. If you think of this graphic and remember that in a way we are all drinking the same water, you might want to include “access to water & sanitation” in your priorities.