Presentation prepared to introduce the water track at the 5th WASH Sustainability Forum. By Stef Smits, José Gesti Canuto and Cecilia Scharp. 30 June - 1 July 2014.

1. Supporting water sanitation
and hygiene services for life
2014 WASH Sustainability Forum
30 June – 1 July 2014
Water: Tools and
Approaches for
Sustainability
Stef Smits, José Gesti
Canuto and Cecilia
Scharp

2. Defining sustainability for water supply
• Whether water
continues to flow
over time, and
whether it continues
to provide an
agreed level of
service
• Systems may need
to be replaced at
the end of their life
time, but services
should be forever

3. Two broad approaches to sustainability
1. Groups of factors (dimensions) that affect likelihood of
sustainability:
• Social
• Technical
• Environmental
• Institutional
• Financial
• Health
• Mainly at community level, but increasingly at other institutional
levels
• Seek to be predictive: if all factors in all dimensions are in place,
services are likely to be sustainability

4. Two broad approaches to sustainability
2. Snapshot of performance in service delivery
- Sustainability manifests itself through level of service to the user
(whether water flows and with what characteristics
- Depending on performance in service delivery by:
- Service provider, responsible for daily operation, maintenance and
administration
- Service authority, responsible for planning, coordination, support and
oversight roles (typically local government)
- Enabling environment
- Snapshot of current situation, as basis for inferences towards the future
- Explicit recognition that sustainability depends on factors at different
institutional levels

5. Four broad group of tools
• Tools to assess sustainability in comprehensive manner, covering
all (or most) dimensions
– Mainly in use for assessments, monitoring and evaluation
• Tools that zoom into one specific dimension,
– More oriented towards identifying actions within that dimension
• Tools to comprehensively assess service delivery performance,
covering all levels
– Identifying what bottlenecks are at different institutional levels
• Tools to assess performance at a single institutional level
– Identifying structural improvement or reform at that level

6. Challenges and gaps

7. Being
comprehensive
Challenges and gaps

8. Challenges and gaps
Keeping it
simple

9. Challenges and gaps
• Sustainability just depends on many factors, at different institutional levels, and often
are interrelated
• But is data on all of these reliably available?
• Do we know the exact interaction between them
• Making sense out of many data to identify bottlenecks and priorities: generation of
alerts
Being
comprehensive
Keeping it
simple

10. The big picture?

11. Or zooming in?

12. Challenges and gaps
• Tools zooming in at a particular dimension or level, may yield more
actionable results
• But may forget links to other factors, levels and dimensions
• Complementarity between tools

13. Challenges and gaps
• Utility of tools depends on institutional capacity to use them
• Therefore need to be commensurate with that institutional capacity

14. Agenda

15. Key questions for discussion
What are the design principles when developing sustainability tools –
possible issues
− Levels and dimensions of sustainability
− Scoring and aggregating
− Evidence that they work
− Qualitative and quantitative:
What is needed to make the tools contribute to sustainability?
− Complementarity between tools
− Contribution to sector change
− Government leadership
− Balance between diversity and standardization of tools

16. Enjoy the flow