Abstract
Abstract With rising coverage figures and the advent of the Sustainable Development Goals, there is increasing attention given to assessing and monitoring the sustainability of water services. Previous efforts in the rural water supply sector have included the development of sustainability checks, while in the urban water supply sector, benchmarking of water services and the performance of utilities has become common practice. This paper argues that neither rural sustainability checks, nor urban benchmarking frameworks, are entirely suitable for monitoring small town water services. It presents a framework specifically developed and applied for assessing and monitoring small town water services. Application of the framework in seven small towns in Ethiopia shows significant discrepancies between the ideal and actual situations. It reveals specific challenges related to sustainable small town water service provision, including capacity at service provider (utility) level, asset management and regulation. The costs of sustainability checks and prospects for uptake as project and wider sector tools are discussed.
Highlights
The Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 7 target C on halving the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water was met in 2010 (WHO/UNICEF, 2014)
How can small town water service provision be checked and monitored? What indicators are most useful for monitoring small town water service provision and what conditions need to be in place? What do results of monitoring small town water services tell us and how can these results be used? This paper seeks to provide answers to these questions by presenting and discussing the case of the development of a sustainability check framework for small and medium town WASH services provision and its application in seven towns in Ethiopia
This paper focuses on the indicators related to small town water services provision
Summary
The Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 7 target C on halving the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water was met in 2010 (WHO/UNICEF, 2014). There is increasing interest in finding ways to assess whether or not the conditions for sustainable water service provision are in place Development partners such as DGIS (Netherlands Directorate-General for International Cooperation), USAID, and more recently, DfID (ICAI, 2016) have been stimulating the development and application of so-called ‘sustainability checks’. Other frameworks for assessing sustainability which have been developed over the last decade include USAID’s Sustainability Index Tool or SIT (USAID, 2013), and the WASH Alliance International’s Sustainability Monitoring Framework (Dutch WASH Alliance, undated) The majority of these project-based sustainability check frameworks have focused on rural water (and sanitation) service provision, focussed on point sources (Boulenouar et al, 2013). It provides access to information on the performance of more than 2,500 water and sanitation utilities from 110 countries, including Ethiopia (van den Berg & Danilenko, 2010)
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