Aguaconsult Newsletter May 2018

Newsletter for May 2018

A lot has happened since our last newsletter in 2017 and we continue to work on a range of interesting projects and with committed and equally engaging clients. From research into policy influencing, strategic support to leading global NGOs, in-depth field research into sanitation financing and micro-financing mechanisms and the design of innovative faecal sludge management (FSM) approaches, our portfolio continues to grow, both in scale and in diversity. Please read on for more information on our work and areas of expertise and explore the rest of our website.

Financing

Financing

Making funds available for the sector is not only critical to extend infrastructure, but also to finance software components, such as building institutional capacity, monitoring, regulation and demand creation. Ensuring efficiency and equity in the use of these funds is also critical, especially in light of limited public funds and the tremendous task of achieving universal and sustainable access to water and sanitation services by 2030. In this context, leveraging funds from the private sector, including from households, and supporting private sector participation in the delivery of water and sanitation services will also prove to be essential, although this will take different forms in different country contexts. 

At Aguaconsult, we advise governments, bilateral and multilateral financing organisations and NGOs on optimum financing strategies. We assess the efficiency, sustainability and equity in the use of public funds, and how they could be applied so as to leverage additional funds from the private sector, whether from tariffs or repayable finance.

We assess the use of innovative financing mechanisms, including microfinance and results-based approaches. We also review and advise on contractual arrangements with the private sector, whether in the context of urban utilities, small piped water schemes in rural areas, or decentralized faecal sludge services, with the view to ensure a balanced risk allocation and that the right incentives are in place for performing and equitable services. Specific tasks that we perform in these areas include:

To find out what we are doing in the area of financing and how we can help, contact our financing specialist Goufrane Mansour.

Water Services

Water Services

Water for human consumption is one of the focal areas for Aguaconsult in the provision of technical services. Access to potable water, coupled with improved environmental sanitation and positive hygiene behaviours are all critical factors in public health and broader social welfare. Improving water services can also provide livelihood opportunities for the poor and thereby contribute to poverty reduction efforts. Unfortunately, for many millions of poor people around the world such access to sustained services is still lacking, despite the large-scale investments made in the sector over the past decades.

Despite the tens of billions of euros invested in delivering new and improving existing water infrastructure, there is evidence that many such physical systems cannot be maintained, fall into disrepair and all too often fail. Aguaconsult has been at the forefront of driving change particularly in the context of rural water provision and has been instrumental in building a new paradigm in policy and practice. Our work in the late 1990s and early 2000s challenged the long-standing orthodoxy that community management of systems was a panacea and we carried out research into the provision of long-term support, specifically in the Latin American region. Since that time we have been at the forefront of the global debate, bringing new insights and action research findings, and building a compelling case for addressing rural water supply as a service rather than the provision of one-off infrastructure projects.

Evidence from a range of countries including Ghana, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Uganda, India and elsewhere suggests that to sustain true services the development community at large – including national governments, donor agencies and civil society implementers – needs to change policy, practice and funding to support a ‘whole system’ to function better. This system includes not only sound construction and appropriate technologies, but also effective support for communities, strong and well-trained local government, a vibrant private sector supplier of goods and services, robust monitoring and some form of asset management to ensure physical systems are maintained.

Above all services will only be sustained properly when there is a clear intuitional framework in place, in which different actors understand their mandates and where national governments and regulators show effective leadership. This requires a commitment to public finance as well as relying on strategic aid funding. Aguaconsult has deep expertise in the analysis and development of the institutional context of water services in developing and transition countries. Examples in this core area include:

 To find out what we are doing in the area of Water and how we can help, contact Harold Lockwood or Julia Boulenouar.

Urban Services

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Urban Services

Rapid, and at times alarming, rates of urbanisation on all continents, coupled with haphazard spatial development of urban areas have led to a growing number of urban poor with no access to basic services. This population and its environment represent both an enormous challenge and opportunity.

With the proportion of urban poor ranging from 28% in Latin America to up to 76% in South Asia and over 800 million slum dwellers living in dire conditions, tackling urban poverty and its spatial manifestations through thoughtful urban planning and the provision of basic services such as water sanitation, transport and housing, is a critical priority for both economic and social development and welfare more generally.

The provision of technical support in urban services is a new focal area for Aguaconsult and builds on experience working in urban planning, urban governance and urban services both in developed and developing countries, for planning organisations and bilateral organisation. In collaboration with major European consulting companies, Aguaconsult can provide the following services to a range of clients:

• Project identification, design and evaluation
• Support to funding or implementation organisations during project implementation
• Research into less well understood aspects of urban service provision and spatial planning

To learn more about how Aguaconsult can support your organisation in this area, please contact Julia Boulenouar.

Sanitation & Hygiene

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Sanitation and Hygiene

Across the globe, 2.5 billion people lack access to adequate and reliable sanitation services  - the lack of effective human waste disposal, both solid and liquid, together with poor hygiene practices pose considerable public health risks globally, and particularly to the rural and urban poor – the disease burden from poor sanitation and hygiene affects major development outcomes, particularly in health, nutrition, education and economic development – whilst sector discourse on sanitation and hygiene focuses on reduction of diseases, to those lacking basic services, particularly women and children, it is also an issue of safety, dignity, respect.

Approaches to rural sanitation and hygiene have shifted progressively from donor handouts to user-financed community led approaches, however sustained improvements have been a challenge, and approaches to enable households to ‘climb the sanitation ladder’ are still far from perfect. The urban context presents ever-growing challenges, with innovations in faecal and solid waste management, business models, and more sophisticated social marketing for behaviour change showing some limited success stories, but clearly there is a long way to go, especially to insure the inclusion of the ultra-poor.

Aguaconsult has project experience providing technical support on sanitation and hygiene to programmes and governments, and advising on sustainable services for both water and sanitation from programme to national level, for example advising the Government of Ghana in the development of its national sanitation strategy.

The Aguaconsult team has diverse experience in sanitation and hygiene, covering aspects such as technologies, policy and sector planning, institutional review, financing, behaviour change and market-based approaches, environmental health enforcement, urban services and planning, (local) private sector development, and integrating sanitation and hygiene into wider health and nutrition interventions.

For more information please contact Georges Mikhael or Will Tillett.

Community management for rural water supply

Community management for rural water supply is dead, long live community management!

The Water Institute at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill invited Harold Lockwood of Aguaconsult to contribute to a policy research digest on the future of community management. The Digest has a considerable readership among policy makers and is disseminated through various channels that allow us to access them, such as the Sanitation and Water for All partnership.

The focus of this edition is on the viability of community management as the predominant model - and policy approach - of many countries in the global south. Based on a review of existing and recent literature Harold sets out the argument that while community management may not be sufficient as the predominant, or only, management approach in many contexts, it should be retained, with greater professionalization and support, alongside a range of other options, including utilities, local private sector operators and, at the other end of the rural spectrum, structured support for self-supply approaches to improve services for the most dispersed communities.

The reality is that  community management is still 'working',  to the extent that many many millions of people around the world still receive a level of service provided for under this model, albeit with a range of experience and use satisfaction, from very high to completely dysfunctional – the key questions is, where does that range of experience sit?

The literature suggests that no one calls for the complete abandonment of community management, but that the model clearly needs (much better) improvement and support in many contexts. In the USA for example, where many millions of rural people still manage their own systems there is a very well-structured system of support, advice, training, access to financing etc. (RCAP is one of a couple of organizations helping to do this: http://rcap.org/). Clearly the USA experience is not reflective of the global reality, so the question then becomes how to provide better support in resource scarce environments – through increasing tariffs, more public financing or some other route?

Finally, he highlights the reality that in countries which are growing in economic terms, where expectations are rising (either through migration, urban-rural links, IT and mobile phone links) and rural demographics are changing the nature of communities (with more densely population villages and small towns), a form of voluntary community management is no longer enough to service complex assets and technologies, large customer bases and the need for proper customer service.

The policy research digest is available here.

Rural Water Supply: Metrics for Sustainability

Towards a Universal Measure of What Works on Rural Water Supply : Rural Water Metrics Global Framework

One of the most pervasive development issues related to the provision of rural water supply services is the lack of sustainability. Assessing and measuring sustainability is a difficult task; to date no clear consensus has emerged on which indicators to use. Unlike in the urban water supply and sanitation where universally recognized indicators exist, the rural water supply sub-sector still lacks a universal metrics global framework. This is because the rural water sector has a wide variety of service levels (water points and piped systems) as well as type of service providers (communities, governments and private sector). The adoption of such universal framework by adapting country monitoring systems will facilitate improved national and global reporting and analysis.

Aguaconsult was contracted by the World Bank's Water Global Practice, which made rural water supply services a key challenge area, to carry out a landscaping and analysis of existing frameworks and indicators in use by a range of governments, development partners and donor agencies; the study was conducted in association with IRC of the Netherlands.

This publication summarizes the methodology and conclusions of a study aimed at proposing a Rural Water Metrics Framework that was based on the findings of analyzing 40 rural water supply indicator frameworks. The proposed Global Framework contains minimum, basic, and advanced indicators to be tailored according to each country context. The study finalizes presenting a total of 24 indicators as being key to monitoring RWSS and proposes further validation and dissemination with regional and global partners in the short term, as well as engagement with regional platforms working on water issues for their framework adoption in the long-term to support data sharing and analysis. Download the brief here.

Agenda for change

Agenda For Change delivers new generic road map to apply principles for collective action and support to local governments

The Agenda For Change initiative was launched in 2015 with a group of like minded organizations recognizing the need to change 'business as usual' in the sector and to set out what we think we need to do differently so that everyone, everywhere can use water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) services that last forever. The first step was a to develop a set of principles to guide our actions in the years to 2030 (end date for achieving universal access to WASH).

Aguaconsult, along with the other core founding members, including Water For PeopleWaterAid and IRC, have been collaborating in a number of countries to align behind local government and coordinate support so that it is more transformative, rather than fragmenting and undermining permanent institutions and actors responsible for delivering WASH services.

A new roadmap has been developed as a tool to enable different actors, working in a range of decentralized settings, to think through and plan their work, whilst at the same time putting local government in the driving seat. The roadmap presented here is not meant to be prescriptive. Systems strengthening processes are rarely linear and do not follow narrowly-defined steps, and as such we recognise that it is often the case that users may start halfway along such a roadmap, go back some steps, to then move forward again. Rather, the roadmap presents a framework of elements for a systems-building agenda for WASH services at the district level. The specific sequencing of activities and even whole steps will need to be adjusted to the context of a specific country or even district, recognizing that countries and sectors move at different speeds and are in various stages of development

We acknowledge that this roadmap is still a work in progress in most countries, and few districts have seen through all the steps. As and when more experiences are gathered, this document will be updated; download the road map here.

Scoping urban sanitation services in three countries: what does it tell us about the race to the SDG 6.2 and how can research accelerate results?

In early 2017, Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP) commissioned a situation analysis of urban sanitation services in Bangladesh, Ghana and Kenya, in order to identify potential research areas as part of the DFID-funded Urban Sanitation Research Initiative. Here, Goufrane Mansour (Aguaconsult, lead expert for the study) and Sam Drabble (WSUP, research manager) reflect on common findings across the three countries,

Bangladesh, Ghana and Kenya present strikingly common features of countries that have recently graduated to lower-middle-income status: high aspirations, as expressed in ambitious national development plans (see for example Ghana’s long-term development plan), rapid urbanisation fuelled by rural-urban migration (Bangladesh, for example, has experienced faster urbanisation than South Asia as a whole between 2000 and 2010) and a gradual, albeit slow, reduction of poverty rates, especially in urban areas. A common challenge is, however, the lack of urban infrastructure, which is clearly holding these countries back. Studies estimate for example that the economic output of Bangladesh’s mega-city, Dhaka, falls short of what would be expected for a metropolitan area with its population density, mainly due to limited infrastructure. Considering sanitation alone, only 53%, 18% and 35% of urban dwellers in Bangladesh, Ghana and Kenya respectively have access to basic sanitation, according to the JMP. Data on access to safely managed services is still scarce and only available for some cities: in Accra and Kumasi in Ghana, 72% and 43% respectively of the sludge produced ends up untreated in the environment. In Dhaka only 0.3% of sludge and wastewater is effectively treated.

Fast urbanisation has also brought its own set of challenges: an estimated 46% and 36% of Kisumu and Nairobi residents (in Kenya) live in informal settlements. In these settings of dense habitat and limited access to networked-based water services, conventional sanitation solutions (i.e. large diameter sewers) are difficult to implement. High tenancy rates (exact figures are scarce), transient populations and “informal regulation” by local leaders (imposing, for example, informal taxes on local businesses) add to the challenges of developing inclusive urban sanitation services.

Looking at the scale of the needs and the constraints of urban settings, achieving universal access to basic sanitation by 2030, let alone increasing access to safely managed services, seems overly optimistic. Unless certain basic requirements fall into place quickly, some countries will find themselves still trailing behind.

The scoping studies commissioned by WSUP have indeed highlighted a number of gaps related to the policy environment as well as institutional and financing arrangements for the urban sanitation sector, which need to be addressed if fast-track progress towards the SDG is to be achieved.

First, although policies that highlight the need to deliver sanitation services for all do exist, actionable bottom-up strategies – ideally feeding into a national master plan for urban sanitation – are still missing. In Ghana for example, local government plans for sanitation (so-called DESSAPs) are mainly focused on solid waste and do not provide a concrete roadmap towards sanitation services for all. Consequently, national policies fail to be embraced at local level and efforts from the different actors in the sector remain disjointed and uncoordinated.

Linked to the above, national institutions with clear mandates for inclusive sanitation are lacking. If sanitation services are to be delivered at scale, national institutions have a major role to play, especially in providing technical assistance to local governments on how to extend services to low-income residents: for example, providing standards for urban sanitation infrastructure, overseeing works, designing and supporting the tender of contracts for faecal sludge management. The creation of a Ministry of Sanitation and Water in Ghana and a draft regulatory framework for faecal sludge management in Bangladesh are steps in the right direction. National stakeholders believe research can make an important contribution to these reforms: as a result, WSUP expects to commission multiple studies in the area of institutional frameworks and capacity, including an international comparative study of models for Ghana’s proposed National Sanitation Authority (NSA) at the request of the new Ministry.

Crucially, governments and local governments do not allocate sufficient funds toward sanitation, particularly to pro-poor urban services. In Bangladesh, most government funds have been allocated to financing CLTS in rural areas. In Ghana, preliminary results from the latest TrackFin exercise revealed that government funding to sanitation did not surpass USD $11.3 million in 2014 – by comparison households’ contribution to the sector amounted to USD $213 million for that same year. There is little data on the allocation to sanitation by newly devolved counties in Kenya, but sanitation is unlikely to be at the top of their priorities. In the context of highly decentralised countries like Ghana and Kenya, clear directives to local governments on acceptable levels of expenditures for sanitation are essential if local funding allocations for sanitation are to be adequate. Research looking at innovative public finance mechanisms for sanitation, part of WSUP’s new Initiative, could help to drive progress in this area (for example, a potentially influential study looking at consumer willingness-to-pay a pro-poor sanitation surcharge, now nearing completion in Kenya). A planned 3-country study looking at financing requirements for pro-poor sanitation services in Bangladesh, Ghana and Kenya could further strengthen the case for increased allocations.

In addition, most policies recognise the role of the private sector in developing sanitation services; however, mechanisms to professionalise pro-poor sanitation services (often performed by informal operators) and to attract or facilitate private sector participation are quasi-non-existent. When present, private sector participation is still at the testing stage, as in the WSUP-supported SWEEP initiative in Dhaka and Chittagong. In order to scale-up, such efforts need to be supported by favourable policies: for example, upstream, by providing large-scale capacity building services to existing or potential operators and downstream by introducing financial incentives to enterprises providing sanitation services. This underpins the rationale for context-specific projects aimed at supporting sanitation business and market development in Bangladesh, Ghana and Kenya, a key area of focus for the Research Initiative.

Finally, a major bottleneck is the lack of implementation and enforcement of urban planning policies and environmental regulations, which exist in all three countries. The result is an ever-expanding unplanned urban space and a proliferation of unfit housing, both of which throw up challenges for improving urban sanitation services. WSUP’s Research Initiative will explore related issues in each of the three focus countries, beginning with a project in Ghana, now nearing completion, which examines smart enforcement models for the provision of compound sanitation in low-income urban areas

“Rien ne sert de courir, il faut partir à point”, says a French proverb; the English equivalent is “Slow and steady wins the race.” If countries do not get the basics right, no matter how fast they run towards 2030, it is unlikely that they will achieve their ambitions to deliver sustainable sanitation services for all.

Note: The scoping studies were conducted in association with Dr. Charles Oyaya (IDIA, Kenya), Harold Esseku (Consultant, Ghana), Waliul Islam and Md. Akhtaruzzaman (Consultants, Bangladesh) under guidance from Guy Norman and Sam Drabble (WSUP UK) and can be accessed here: Ghana, Kenya, Bangladesh