Creating an enabling environment for community-based rural water supply, sanitation and hygiene promotion systems: case study: reforming the Rural Department of the National Water Agency (INAPA) in the Dominican Republic

Enabling environments are those organizational and/or social structures that, when established, will sustain the implementation of programs and determine the scale of the public health impact of those programs.
This report documents assistance given by EHP on behalf of USAID and focuses on distilling lessons from the experience that may be useful in crafting interventions for creating enabling environments for the support of other community-based rural water supplies, sanitation and hygiene promotion. The conclusions and the lessons learned provided in this report may be useful not only in the Dominican Republic, but also in other countries that are sorting out how best to support rural communities in managing their water supply and sanitation (WSS) systems.
INAPA is charged with responsibility for the thousands of small- and medium-sized rural water systems in the Dominican Republic, but it operates without adequate resources to carry out this broad mandate. In the shortfall, other players have moved into the sector, each with their own approach, standards, style and priorities. INAPA urgently needed to define a new role for the rural part of its work that was more in line with its resources and consistent with sector participation of a multitude of other agencies and organizations. Key concepts in the change agenda were community-based management, decentralization of agency work, a shift by INAPA from an implementation to oversight/normative role and integrated health interventions rather than water supply projects in isolation.