This page gives an overview of the papers and presentations that were provided on topic 1 of the 2013 symposium in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Published on: 31/05/2013
Explores financing sustainable WASH service delivery.
This paper sets out the overall vision for the UN-Water GLAAS TrackFin initiative, which aims to define and test a globally accepted methodology to track financing to WASH at national level, so as to improve our understanding of current total expenditure in the WASH sector. This initiative proposes to support countries to develop national WASH-Accounts, similar to the National Health Accounts that are developed in the health sector.
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This paper tracks the direct support and capital maintenance cost of rural water services and compares the levels of the actual with the realistic or ideal cost for sustainable service delivery. The study is based on analysis of data on actual expenditure of water systems generated by the WASHCost study in Ghana and the use of planning and budgeting exercises to generate the realistic ExpDS conducted as part of decentralised level life-cycle cost approach (LCCA) training. The study shows that both the direct support cost and capital maintenance expenditure in Ghana are far lower than the international benchmarks for sustainable water service delivery.
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This paper discusses how the action research cycle data feeds into sector debates, such as budgeting and sector financing. By analyses of the evolution of the process, the strength and weaknesses are brought forward. The authors show that there is scope for widening the process to include small town systems and sanitation, but that care needs to be taken to keep the data as simple as possible. The desire to disaggregate needs to be balanced with the difficulties of obtaining meaningful information from sufficient contracts and interventions. The paper concludes with the specific challenges to use this data for transparency purposes.
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Affordability is one of five criteria of the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation, adopted by the Human Rights Council which calls upon States "To continuously monitor and regularly analyse the status of the realisation of the right to safe drinking water and sanitation on the basis of the criteria of availability, quality, acceptability, accessibility and affordability". If services are not affordable, people will not access them in the first place and will be deprived of a basic service.
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The water and sanitation sector in Uganda is facing a situation of stagnating coverage, functionality and budgets. In order to increase efficiency of investments in the sector, it is necessary to improve financial planning and budgeting, and IRC and Fontes took a first step in the period April to July 2012.
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Other relevant presentations on this topic can be found on:
