People expect water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) services to last. However, despite increasing WASH coverage, there is also evidence of high rates of system failure and ‘slippage’, where some users and communities fall back to a lower level of service or have to revert to unsafe and unreliable facilities or practices.
Published on: 29/06/2011
People expect water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) services to last. However, despite increasing WASH coverage, there is also evidence of high rates of system failure and ‘slippage’, where some users and communities fall back to a lower level of service or have to revert to unsafe and unreliable facilities or practices.
Accepting that there is a distinction between the physical system (infrastructure) and the service which these systems deliver is a fundamental starting point of the concepts described in this training package. Service refers to the provision of a public benefit through a continuous and permanent flow of activities and resources. This is a concept applied in many other services, both in the developing and developed worlds, such as health, education, electricity, telecommunications and urban water supplies.
The service delivery approach is a conceptual approach taken at sector level to the provision of rural water supply services. It emphasises all the components necessary to deliver a service, consisting of both the hardware (engineering or construction elements) and software (awareness raising, capacity building, institutional support) required to provide a certain level of access to the service provided. The sector must begin to monitor all life cycle costs and associated service levels in order to improve the cost-effectiveness of investments and keep the promise of sustainable WASH services, especially for the poor. Accounting for the full life-cycle costs is an essential aspect of a service delivery approach and provides the framework and tools for collecting and assessing costs. We refer to this as the life-cycle cost approach (LCCA).
In this module we examine the current ways of working, challenges facing the WASH sector and introduce the service delivery approach and life-cycle cost approach, their underlying principles and key components.
At the end of Module 1 the participants will:
