Technical Assistance
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic – and the increased importance of good hygienic practices – highlights the critical importance of safe WASH services and the WASH systems that support them. The Sustainable Services Initiative (SSI) – an undertaking of Welthungerhilfe, in partnership with Aguaconsult, the German Toilet Organization (GTO) and Viva con Agua – has recently published Tools for Practitioners to strengthen WASH systems (or simply the SSI-Toolbox).
Aguaconsult’s Harold Lockwood has been providing technical support to the USAID Sustainable WASH systems programme and has recently published the following report – Sustaining Rural Water: A Comparative Study of Maintenance Models for Community-Managed Schemes. As rural water supply coverage rates rise across many countries, attention is increasingly being paid to finding and implementing cost-effective mechanisms to ensure this improved initial access is sustained over time. Conventional approaches to maintenance have largely been based on voluntary community-based management with communities taking on the burden of maintenance themselves, with limited, if any, support from external agencies or local government. Recently, there have been attempts to professionalize maintenance services and make these services affordable at the point of delivery. This study considers different variations of maintenance approaches. It provides a typology for characterizing maintenance service provision models, a framework for analyzing them, and an in-depth study of seven maintenance models that represent different cases from the typology of approaches. Based on this comparative analysis, the study outlines emerging trends and recommendations for broader consideration.
Sustaining Rural Water: A Comparative Study of Maintenance Models for Community-Managed Schemes
Aguaconsult, together with our long-standing partner in Ghana, Maple Consult, is now carrying out a follow-up assessment of the first phase of the Rotary-USAID partnership which invested in water supply, sanitation and hygiene interventions in five districts in 2012.
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