Opinions and voices for change
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Driven amongst others by the mobile phone applications, more and more statistics are becoming available on the state of water services. These go well beyond the coverage data we were used to in the JMP reports (and which this year gave us some reason to be mildly optimistic). The new stats provide... Read more...
On the 11th of September 2012, IRC debated the pros and cons of sanitation subsidies. These are a common tool used to motivate households to construct toilets. This seems an obvious response: many who lack access to sanitation are extremely poor and the potential public health benefits of universal... Read more...
What started off as a commonplace lecture-like meeting in the Lira District Council Hall, ended up in a spirited discussion about a variety of issues around the delivery of water services in a decentralisation framework. Conditional grants for water and sanitation; mobile phones for water; as well... Read more...
I have written before about our work on life-cycle cost analysis (LCCA) in Honduras. The idea is to look into the real costs of investment programmes and projects in Honduras, so see which intervention model is the most cost-effective. Read more...
The costing sustainable services training that took place in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, between the 8 th -10 th of May 2012 examined ways to improve the financing of water service delivery in Ethiopia and specifically to increase the sustainability of service delivery. The main gaps that were... Read more...
Just as Orpheus descended into the underworld to bring his wife Eurydice back to life, the water sector invests heavily in bringing broken-down water supply systems back into function; often to find those same systems slipping back into disuse, as soon as the engineers turn their head to look away... Read more...
What does it cost to provide water services that last? What do we mean by a water service? Read more...
Financing water and sanitation improvements for the very poor remains a major challenge over large areas of the globe. IRC and WSUP show that effective solutions to this challenge do exist. See discussion paper: Financing water and sanitation for the poor: six key solutions (below). Which of the... Read more...
A model where public funds provide the back-end and private funds provide the front-end can fill the gap in sanitation financing in India, writes Anupam Tyagi from the International Management Institute in the Economic Times of February 9th, 2012. According to a recent report by Water and... Read more...
Could lack of definition be undermining the impact of effective but costly support? Read more...
“ We just take the programmes as they fall upon us, with their conditions. One donor uses a per capita threshold of 150 US$/capita and wants us to follow one approach, and we will do that. Another uses a threshold of 250 US$/day, but with another approach, and a different degree of community... Read more...
The Guardian the other day posted an article which claimed that water and sanitation projects are not sexy enough and that donors therefore are not willing to invest in them. According to various interviewees in the article, donors prefer to invest in schools or clinics, rather than in "unsexy"... Read more...