Community water management

IRC and six partners are disseminating experiences from their four years of experience in a community management research project funded by the Government of the Netherlands. This issue of PLA Notes(Participatory Learning and Action) contains 12 articles about experiences from this Participatory Action Development project in 22 communities in 6 countries. The first section contains articles written by IRC staff, including a project overview and articles on the various project phases and the methodology used. In the second part team members from Cameroon, Colombia, Guatemala, Kenya, Nepal and Pakistan highlight key experiences from the joint learning process in the participating communities. The key message coming out of the articles is that communities will increase their capacity to implement effective improvement in the management of their water supply system, if they are treated as full partners in: diagnosing and prioritizing problems, experimenting with the solutions identified, and sustaining, sharing the results and building local capacities throughout this process.