Achieving Sustainable Rural Sanitation at Scale
Dear KnowledgePoint members,
During the Stockholm World Water week Seminar on "Pieces of the Puzzle: Achieving Sustainable Rural Sanitation at Scale" on 27 August, there were some questions from the participants that the panelists could not answer, for example:
- How do you build capacity when you have 3 year donor funded programmes and governments wants/needs 10-15 years of support? How can we change the paradigm to make longer commitment to governments?
- Sanitation services are heavily subsidized by government in developed countries and cities in developing countries. Why do we expect poor rural families to pay the full cost?
- Will building up capacities on local level be sufficient? Or do you need a minimum capacity development on national/ regional level?
You have provided interesting and useful answers to our last questions! Hopefully we will have the same success this time. Looking forward to your comments.
Thank you very much and best regards,
Evelyn (on behalf of the SuSanA secretariat)
Find the full list of unanswered questions here: https://forum.susana.org/forum/categor...
3 Answers
Regarding the 2nd question on why "we expect poor rural families to pay the full cost? [of rural sanitation]", I suspect that the "we" in this case refers to supporters of CLTS and others who claim that subsidies don't work. Rural sanitation subsidies are common and can be effective if properly applied. A recent UNC review of sanitation subsidies concluded:
Global experience with well-designed and implemented sanitation programming suggests that subsidies are not necessary to dramatically reduce open defec[a]tion in many locales. However, there are other contexts in which access to finance or carefully designed, implemented, and targeted hardware subsidies may play an important role in accelerating the adoption of improved sanitation.
Source: Detailed Review of a Recent Publication: Sanitation Subsidies in Bangladesh. (WaSH Policy Research Digest ; issue 1). UNC Water Institute, July 2015. https://waterinstitute.unc.edu/files/2015/06/WaSH-Policy-Digest-july2015.pdf
Cor Dietvorst, IRC
Dear Evelyn, Thank you for your interesting query. My initial, knee jerk response would be that the transition from 'emergency' situations to 'development' is very difficult and the lines become blurred. Whilst emergency situations may attract a lot more attention , the longer term sustainable development is perhaps a slightly different economic and political model. I am no doubt elaborating on the well known issues rather than providing any definitive response, I hope some of our experienced experts will be able to contribute more.
Best wishes Pauline RedR
Dear KnowledgePoint members,
Thanks for helping us answer the unanswered questions of the SSW Panel discussions!
We made a good start, so hopefully we will have the same success this time. Looking forward to your comments!
Here are the next three unanswered questions:
- Can NGOs effectively facilitate private sector/ businesses (that make money)?
- Any examples of cross-financing rural sanitation through water supply and related experiences/ approaches/ methods to provoke institutional change?
- How to get local government to put budget on long term management of sanitation facilities?
Thank you very much and best regards,
Jasmin (on behalf of the SuSanA secretariat)
Find the full list of unanswered questions here: https://www.forum.susana.org/forum/cat...
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