Que es el enfoque de costos del ciclo de vida? Nota informativa explicando cuales son los principales componentes de los costos de agua y saneamiento en áreas rurales y periurbanas.

The WASH sector has come a long way since 2010; as WASH professionals, we are starting to have a common and shared financial language. So what is preventing us as a sector to have better financial data? And when we get it, what is holding us back from sharing it? At the symposium, the many presenters will aim to go beyond these constraints, provide their visions and share specific methodologies that can monitor finance.
The purpose of this Background Paper is to introduce Topic 1 of IRC’s International Water and Sanitation Centre Symposium 2013 on Monitoring Sustainable WASH Service Delivery: “Monitoring the finance needed for sustainable service delivery”. The objectives of Topic 1 are: to present and discuss the latest technical proposals that monitor and track financial flows in the WASH sector at international and national levels, and to provide a platform for discussion on the difficult area of measuring the cost effectiveness of hygiene interventions. Furthermore, it is expected that the incentives for financial monitoring are demonstrated and how information can be used in practice to improve service delivery. [authors abstract]

Water and sanitation services for the very poor remain grossly deficient over large areas of the globe, and financing water and sanitation improvements for these people remains a major challenge. This paper proposes six Key Solutions to overcome this challenge. We urge financing institutions, governments and service providers worldwide to put these Key Solutions into practice. (author's abstract)

Briefing note with key findings on the comparison of the financial costs of a range of traditional and improved latrines and the quality of service delivered to users.

The water and sanitation sector faces a sustainability challenge because of the emphasis on installing pipes and pumps instead of ongoing service delivery. When a WASH service is unreliable or completely fails, it is the people without access to safe alternatives who are most affected. People lose the essential services they have come to expect. One way to face this challenge is to assess and estimate the life-cycle costs of providing WASH services. What are the construction, operation, and maintenance costs for ensuring delivery of adequate, equitable and sustainable WASH services? What are the renewal, replacement and rehabilitation costs needed to
ensure sustainability? How much does it take to support post-construction activities? As life-cycle costs become mainstreamed, governments, donors, NGOs and the private sector will be better able to plan for service delivery and know how and where to invest to keep service quality from falling back. Understanding, collecting and using these life-cycle costs is the aim of the WASHCost project. Guided by Learning Alliances, WASHCost is taking place in Andhra Pradesh (India), Burkina Faso, Ghana and Mozambique. The collection and disaggregation of cost data over the full life-cycle of WASH services provides a better understanding of costs drivers and enables cost effective and equitable service delivery. WASHCost has adopted an action-oriented or stakeholder-driven approach to research. There is a constant balancing act between the priorities at country level and those at international/global level – while ensuring that all teams progress at the same speed. The country teams keep a balance between these priorities. [authors abstract]

The WASHCost project (www.washcost.info) is carrying out action research into the life-cycle costs of provision of rural WASH services in Burkina Faso, Ghana, India (Andhra Pradesh) and Mozambique. WASHCost collects and analyses information on the disaggregated costs of providing rural services, and in parallel advocates for the effective use of this information in decision making about service delivery. The project’s objective is to enable more cost effective provision of sustainable services to rural populations and especially the poor. To support identification of the most likely pathways to wide ruse of cost information, and thus to achieving the projects objectives, initial mapping work was carried out in the four countries to understand the main sector drivers, and particularly the flow of decision making, planning and budgeting for rural WASH service provision.
This note is based on a WASHCost working paper that synthesises the findings of these mapping studies. In looking at the WASH sectors across the four countries, a number of common trends can be identified. An important difference between the countries is that while in India universal coverage in water services is (rightly or wrongly) assumed to have been achieved leading to a concentration on sustainability; in the African countries sustainability (avoiding slippage) is only just starting to come onto the agenda, and the focus is primarily on delivering new services. Using cost information in decision making ‘Real’ decision making continues to happen at national level, and within projects. For WASHCost to achieve its objectives, it must be possible to clearly identify (existing or potential) planning or decision making processes into which cost information can be fed. Currently, in all four countries these processes are at best partial: cost is not currently a major driver in to decision making in the sector. What cost information exists, is typically limited to the formulation of national level strategies, plans and projects which are seldom strongly linked to financial flows. Indeed, the disconnect between planning and budgeting by sector ministries and national financing frameworks (such as Medium Term Expenditure Frameworks) is striking. This is true at the national level and even more so at the sub-national. Although frameworks and activities for decentralised planning exist in all countries, only in India are these linked to significant financial flows. In practice, much decentralised planning is a largely paper exercise. In the African countries, new services tend to be delivered by projects, and hence planning takes place at the level of, and specific to, the project. Awareness of costs is limited to capital investment Awareness of unit costs at all levels is typically limited to capital investment (often in a highly aggregated form). National figures provide per-capita costs for implementing different types of scheme. Information or awareness about other aspects of unit costs is very limited; how much is spent on the operation and maintenance of typical schemes or how much it costs to provide support services? Costs for major rehabilitation and replacement are
even less discussed, and can be considered as something of an intentional blind spot in the sector – everyone knows they are there, but no one (governments or donor) really wants to address the matter. The findings of the rapid assessments show both challenges and opportunities to WASH cost. Challenges, because the WASH sectors in all four countries are in a state of great change, with blurred and sometimes contradictory areas of governance responsibility; nascent planning processes; and, in donor dependent countries, only gradual movement towards greater harmonisation. This means that it can be difficult to identify a single clear entry point for, or potential owner of, WASH cost information. That said, after decades of stagnation, real progress and real opportunities exist within the processes of harmonization and decentralization. To achieve its objectives, WASH Cost needs to actively engage with these processes, and use an intelligent mix of advocacy and action research to develop in parallel both the demand for
cost information, and the tools by which this can be made useful. [authors abstract]

This note is based on a working paper of the WASHCost project and sets out current thinking on defining and stratifying water service delivery. To do this, a ‘ladder’ has been developed, with each up step the ladder representing a clearly defined qualitative and quantitative improvement in service provided to  users. The WASHCost project looks at the life cycle costs of providing sustainable WASH services in Burkina Faso, Ghana, India (Andhra Pradesh) and Mozambique. The service delivery ladder has been developed, and will be tested, by WASHCost to enable like-with-like comparison of water service delivery across different countries and contexts. The objective is to be able to answer the question: what does it cost to sustainably provide a given level of water service over the full life-cycle of the different elements of the service delivery system(s). WASHCost will also use the ladder to investigate and compare designed-for service with actual service received. In WASHCost a service level is understood to contain clearly defined (and normative) range of acceptable values for a set of key indicators of service provision: quantity, quality, reliability, accessibility, and status. [authors abstract]

This essay addresses innovative ways of financing safe sanitation in poor urban households and neighbourhoods. Although sanitation comprises several components, this paper focuses only on human excreta disposal. It is argued that the urban poor already finance their sanitation, mostly in loss of time, energy, dignity, health, income and development opportunities. To turn these losses around and fulfil basic human rights, creative financing systems are needed. Using a combination of literature review, personal and documented experiences, the authors present an overview of traditional and innovative financing approaches and mechanisms for urban poor sanitation, and discuss their advantages and limitations. (authors abstract)

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) identified water and sanitation services as key factors in lifting people out of poverty. However, the influential Camdessus Report estimated that financial flows to the sector must at least double to achieve the MDG water and sanitation targets. Financing is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for achieving adequate water and sanitation services and the resulting benefits on health, education and economic activity. Traditional approaches to financing the sector are not meeting this challenge and have contributed to the development of unsustainable, oversized and inefficient facilities. Typically, governments, development agencies and the private sector fund large infrastructure projects, such as dams and reservoirs, through a top-down decision-making process that leaves little room for unserved people to express or satisfy their needs. While better off people in cities have piped water at low cost, millions of urban dwellers are excluded because systems cannot expand to meet their needs. In particular, people moving to urban areas, slum dwellers and people in small towns are often excluded. Over recent years, innovative financing solutions have emerged to encourage financial flows into the sector from a wide range of organisations, each with its own responsibilities, but working together in greater coordination. These innovations seek to offer financial systems better suited to devolved services and to provide options for low income service users and communities.

(authors abstract)