Institutionalising the monitoring of rural water supply services in Latin America : lessons from El Salvador, Honduras and Paraguay : a paper presen...

Various countries in Latin America have started monitoring rural water supply service delivery at sector level, driven largely by two objectives: to establish rural water inventories for investment planning; and to better target post-construction support for more sustainable service delivery.
However, such monitoring systems may suffer from limited sustainability themselves, in the absence of clear institutional arrangements for monitoring or when budgets and capacities for this are limited. IRC and the Inter-American Development Bank have been supporting the development and implementation of rural water monitoring systems in El Salvador, Honduras and Paraguay. A methodology was developed and tested to institutionalise service delivery monitoring into the sector, by identifying institutional arrangements and defining responsibilities for financing the costs of monitoring. This paper provides an overview of the approach followed, illustrated by examples (including cost estimates), from the three countries. [authors abstract]