Water service provision for the peri-urban poor in post-conflict Angola

Source: International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED)

Date: 04 Sep 2009

Human Settlements Working Paper Series: Water - 6

Allan Cain, Development Workshop - Angola with Martin Mulenga

SUMMARY

The provision of water and sanitation services in deprived urban settlements is a challenge faced by many countries in the South. The high rates of urbanisation and the rapid increase in urban population has meant that peri-urban areas are growing much more rapidly than formal urban areas resulting in low levels of services such as water supply and sanitation.

The lack of these services threatens not only the public health and environment of the people in peri-urban areas, but also those living in the formal urban areas as well (See McGranahan, 2007; Mulenga et al., 2004).

The adoption of the international water and sanitation targets within the Millennium Development Goals are therefore laudable but the problem has been the failure to give attention to indicators, financial mechanisms and institutions that are designed by local organisations at local level. The dominant response to water and sanitation problems, has been to look to internationally comparable indicators to monitor improvement, international financial mechanisms to fund improvements, and internationally endorsed institution shifts (e.g. more private sector participation) to drive improvements. And yet, there are many innovative and inspiring examples of locally driven initiatives that improve water and sanitation provision in deprived urban areas, including some that have reached considerable scale. Although efforts to replicate local successes or models have sometimes been disappointingly slow, there have been important advances in local information collection, financing, and organisation.

The World Bank (2003) World Development Report on "Making Services Work for the Urban Poor" and the report on the Millennium Development Goal Task on Water and Sanitation (2005) conclude that a prerequisite for success is for deprived residents and their organisations to be driving efforts to improve water and sanitation. Building on the successes of existing locally driven initiatives, can bring international water and sanitation targets closer to realisation. Many of these local innovations not only improve water and sanitation provision, but do so in a manner that involves and responds to women far more than conventional water and sanitation projects do.

Successful local initiatives are sometimes documented as "best practices", and attempts are made to develop replicable models that can be promoted more widely. However, a best practice in one setting can be bad practice in another, and even highly relevant examples rarely provide the basis for directly replicable approaches. Moreover, the qualities needed to deliver improvements to local residents are not the same as the qualities needed to engage in international promotion or to attract the attention of the institutional promoters of "best practices".

Locally successful initiatives can, however, provide the basis for horizontal learning (through having local teams learn directly from each other). They can also provide the basis for a better understanding of how to identify and build upon local initiatives that are likely to improve water and sanitation provision in deprived areas (through careful research based on the analysis of a range of different cases). Furthermore, by combining forces, local initiatives can also become more visible and influential in both national and international arenas.

This paper is one of five case studies that were part of an IIED coordinated research project funded by Sida, DANIDA and DFID. This project was entitled Improving Water and Sanitation Provision Globally, Through Information and Action Driven Locally. The main goal of this project was to contribute towards the improvement of water supply and sanitation in low-income urban settlements so that the water, sanitation and slum improvement targets of the Millennium Development Goals can be achieved.

The immediate objective was to strengthen successful locally-driven water and sanitation initiatives, starting with a network based on a selection of ongoing initiatives. Five local organisations actively engaged in local water and sanitation initiatives were identified for the project and these included: Development Workshop (DW) in Angola, IIED-America Latina in Argentina, People's Dialogue Ghana (PDG) in Ghana, the Orangi Pilot Project Research and Training Institute (OPP-RTI) in Pakistan and The Society for the Promotion of Area Resources Centre (SPARC) in India. The partners were identified based on their innovative experiences and efforts to improve conditions in urban poor communities, including local water and sanitation. The project also aimed to enable the partners to learn and share experiences directly from each other, and influence the efforts of international agencies to improve water and sanitation in deprived urban communities.

Although the teams may have different strategies, there are striking similarities and common principles. All the partners work outside the water sector, but have a deep understanding of the conditions and politics of urban poverty. Each team designed their part of the project so that it contributed to the local agenda, but also so that they could all combine to have an important impact internationally. Building on these advances and sharing them among localities are critical to achieving international water and sanitation targets. Although most of the partners are already performing well it was the intention of the project that, the teams involved in the network will increase their capacity to address local water and sanitation deficiencies through what they have learned from other successful initiatives.

One of the motivating factors that led to the project was the need to develop a better understanding of how to identify and support successful locally driven initiatives to improve water and sanitation provision in urban poor communities. To allow for effective dialogue and sharing of information between the five teams working on this project, a web based discussion forum was set up. The discussion forum offered a platform through which any common themes, common approaches, sharing of experiences and resources could debated and the knowledge shared easily. The sharing of ideas also enabled the teams to inspire each other.

In order to help focus the research, four key issues in the water and sanitation sector were identified and agreed upon by the participating teams as being common to all of them. These issues made it easier for the teams to link the more group-specific issues with those of other teams at the international level. These issues were:

• Working in collaboration
• Financing water and sanitation improvements
• Using information to drive local action and monitor improvements
• Going to scale

Partnership has always been recognised as a key component in the achievement of development in communities. It must be noted that community-driven water and sanitation improvements are very limited if they are pursued by communities acting on their own. The same applies to private, market-driven improvement efforts, and to government-driven schemes, at least when it comes to improving conditions in the most deprived urban areas.

Much depends on the relations between these communities, government authorities and water and sanitation providers, both formal and informal. A great number of development projects are designed and implemented by professionals which permit urban poor groups no influence and which rarely produce the hoped for improvements in water and sanitation. Many professionals object to community-driven projects because their own role and importance is diminished – and because their professional training did not equip them to know how to work with urban poor groups and to support their initiatives. And in most cases, the official development assistance agencies find it difficult to support community-driven development because their structures and procedures were never designed to do so.

However, new and interesting methods and institutional structures have emerged in urban poor communities, sometimes leading to the establishment of new institutions such as water boards or community-based organisations with legal standing, and the development of new "paperwork" (including contracts, charters, licences and regulations. In post-war Angola, Development Workshop has supported the construction and management of over 200 urban standpipes, more than 700 hand-dug wells, and the development of local elected committees to manage these standpipes, working in collaboration with the water utility and the local authority. Development Workshop uses the stakeholder approach to bring community and state actors together. The approach does not just involve identifying the potential partners or building their capacity but involves bringing them together and helping them to work together. It also involves, repeated face-to-face interaction, so as to achieve a successful outcome and also create trust and an understanding of mutual benefits of working together.

In order for these initiatives to work, however, communities need to be organised and committed and the water and sanitation agencies need to be responsive to the needs of these people. Although there are attempts in many places where Development Workshop operates, to move towards involvement of a wider range of stakeholders, it must be noted that not all engagements are productive and result oriented.

Financing water and sanitation improvements

Financing and cost recovery are key issues for sustainable water and sanitation schemes. Considering the importance of household and community action and investment in improving water and sanitation, there is need to develop appropriate finance schemes. The impact of better local financial systems on improving the provision for water and sanitation may be direct - as they fund these improvements – or indirect as, for instance, they finance urban poor communities acquiring official tenure of their land, which then allows official water and sanitation utilities to serve them. In one sense, loan finance might seem inappropriate for low-income households, especially the poorest, since they have the least capacity to repay loans. But experience from some countries has shown that if loan packages are designed and managed in ways that match the needs and repayment capacities of low-income households, limited funding can go much further. In addition, when a small loan is combined with community-driven initiatives that strive to keep down unit costs, its potential becomes much greater. Collective loans can have particular importance – for instance by allowing savings groups formed by urban poor households to purchase land together and on which new housing can be developed. Subsidies too can play a role, at least when they are part of a viable financing strategy.

Experience by Development Workshop in Angola, shows that, relying solely on centralised funds from the state budget to maintain local infrastructure in low-income urban areas has proved unrealistic. The DW experience also shows that the extension of services to the urban poor need not be about securing external finance, but can be achieved through the development of competent, capable, accountable local agencies or utilities that can work with community organisations. Costs are recovered through the payment of water sold at the standposts by users. These standposts are managed by Associations of Water Committees. The participation of the community in the management of services in order to ensure sustainable services is fundamental. Some local Associations of Water Committees have actually managed to invest their own accumulated capital in the extension of the network supply, through the construction of new standposts and the organisation of management committees.

Using information to drive local action and monitor improvements

One of the major reasons given by water and sanitation agencies for their failure to extend services to slums and squatter settlements has been the lack of baseline data about these settlements. A survey and documentation of physical conditions, social actors and relationships, economic conditions is very important because this will show what already exists and what needs to be improved on. It must also be noted that, in the absence of such documentation, realistic and cost effective planning cannot take place (Hasan, 2006). All of the partners on this project have used locally gathered or processed information to help drive local action. Some involves using high-tech equipment, much of it is map-based, and almost all of it serves a clear strategic purpose.

To initiate action and dialogue with government agencies, Development Workshop and the local communities carry out detailed slum enumerations and surveys that draw information from each household and develop detailed maps with the participation of the residents. The maps provide a basis for detailed plans for development. Mapping is a useful tool to gather information about existing conditions in deprived urban areas. Through mapping communities have been more knowledgeable about their situation, and empowered to challenge and find solutions to the issues they face. Development Workshop has also invested considerable time and resources in the development of tools appropriate for local administration staff and residents' committees to monitor service provision and to gather all available information in one place (Cain et al., 2002). Development Workshop also encourages local administrators to use the information generated locally to lobby provincial and central government for further allocation of resources.

Scaling up

Despite the observation in the international development circles that the urban poor communities are badly served with water and sanitation services, the local authorities have in most cases remained unresponsive. The majority of urban poor have ended up building their own water and sanitation facilities which are often of poor quality due to lack of support from the local authorities. However, there are numerous small-scale models of successful sustainable community managed water and sanitation projects, but most remain models.

The common criticism of many such innovative water and sanitation projects is that they cannot deliver at scale. At one level, this is supremely unfair. In many of the most deprived urban communities, local groups collaborate to improve water and sanitation services, often under very difficult circumstances. Authorities and donors should be striving to find ways to support and link up to such initiatives, and not just criticise them for not going to scale. If these initiatives do not all follow the same reproducible blueprint, this may be because adaptability is a critical element of success. The obstacles to expanding community-driven programmes are as likely to lie in the policy environment as in the community-level strategies. Both the duration and nature of the community engagement vary considerably among the partners to this project, as do their strategies for going to scale. Among partners this may be a value in sharing strategies.

There are few examples of donors who are supporting replication and providing adequate capital for well-conceived strategies, but many more are needed if the challenges facing the majority of the urban poor are to be addressed. If scaling up is to occur and proven ideas are to spread, support is needed at both community and national levels. Failure to work in more coordinated approaches, pooling resources to work with governments on a coherent agreed set of policy reforms has contributed to the failure to scale up successful water and sanitation projects. Project approaches have also been divisive of international agencies, often leading to competition rather than coordination, and resulting in fractured policy agendas. The funding patterns which promote short duration projects also conspire against building strong organisations ideal for scaling up processes. Further, there has been a concern that the project approach has 'tended to accelerate rather than retard the deterioration of local institutions and to undermine the foundation needed for long-term sustainability. Problems include bypassing local capacity development, creating small islands of excellence promoted under special conditions not shared by those institutions or providers outside the project environment, and reducing a push for nationally developed and owned policy strategies that signal long-term commitment to change.

This paper shows how Development Workshop has managed to scale up water supply and sanitation initiatives. It has done so by engaging strategically with the communities, Angolan Government, the national Water Directorate, UNICEF, the European Union and other actors in the sector. DW is one of the Angolan Government's key implementing partners on their urban community based water programme which aims to institutionalise the concept of community management and the accountability of service providers to the consumers. This gives DW an opportunity to introduce lessons from research into the practical implementation of water projects that will be replicated widely by Government.

DW has also concluded that in order to provide a sustainable service, it is necessary to adopt many of the principals of cost-recovery, to charge an affordable fee for water that is used to keep the local infrastructure operational. Experience has shown that relying solely on centralized funds from the state budget to maintain local infrastructure in the peri-urban bairros has proved unrealistic. An inevitable part of developing sustainable basic services that serve the collective good and which people will support and have trust in is the creation of accountable institutions. Peri-urban residents are not averse to the idea of paying for a public water supply, provided that:

• the cost is less than what they pay for water from private water tanks;
• they have some assurance about the quality of the service provided;
• they have some assurance that funds go to sustaining the service (Pinto and Ribeiro, 1998).

The paper also shows how DW has supported the construction and management of a significant number of water systems through locally elected water committees in collaboration with the water utility and the local authority. This experience has translated into advocacy for the adoption of these lessons into Government plans and policies, with the aim of mobilising state resources to scale up the provision of community services through participatory methods.