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What WSUP Does
- Bring together complementary expertise in water and sanitation
- Focus where investment can be most effective
- Provide affordable water and sanitation services
- Create genuine local economic returns
- Engage local communities from the start
- Promote community health
- Design for positive environmental impact
- Ensure long term sustainability through comprehensive capacity building
- Provide a high quality service to local service authorities (LSAs)
- Share learning and experience beyond WSUP
Bring together complementary expertise in water and sanitation
WSUP brings together diverse experience and complementary skills from multiple sectors with a genuine interest in providing water and sanitation services to the poor.
The NGOs and academic institutions provide WSUP with valuable ‘organic’ experience related to poverty, natural resources, and environmental and socio-economic issues (in organisational behavioural terms). They mobilise local communities to define the improved water supply and sanitation model that best meets their needs and capacity to sustain the improved model, whilst encouraging hygiene behavioural change.
The private sector contributes its strong technical and managerial expertise, including design and project management. WSUP’s water utility and technical consulting expertise is critical to achieving a satisfactory performance level from the local water agency or service authority. It adds value to what some would call the ‘mechanical’ aspects of ensuring a continuous supply of water while ensuring improved billing and revenue collection.
Focus where investment can be most effective
WSUP targets cities, mid-size towns and peri-urban clusters (~100,000 inhabitants) rather than areas with a low population density.
Projects will centre on a medium-term management partnership with a local service authority, and will respond to the expressed needs of Local or Regional Service Authorities, whether public or private, to increase water and sanitation service coverage.
Provide affordable water and sanitation services
WSUP will support the development of tariff structures with regard to appropriate service levels and the capacity of the poor to pay for them, as well as ensuring cost recovery for operation and maintenance. A quantitative benchmark with household service provision charges representing 5% of household income will be adopted in these exercises. Projects will strive for the LSA to achieve the appropriate balance between this benchmark and full cost recovery tariffs (i.e. tariffs covering at least O&M cost and depreciation) whilst considering non-poor consumer cross-subsidies to fill any gaps.
Create genuine local economic returns
Investment in the water sector in developing countries usually requires grants and subsidies to achieve financial viability. However, this masks the true economic picture. The WHO report titled "Evaluation of the Costs and Benefits of Water and Sanitation Improvements at the Global Level" indicates that for every $1 spent on water and sanitation interventions towards the MDGs, the economic return is between $3 and $34, depending on the geographic region. This includes the effects of time saved from fetching water, the gain in productive time due to prevented illness, health sector and patient cost savings as well as the value of avoided premature deaths.
WSUP’s partnership based approach is focused on long-term sustainability of its projects, as opposed to short-term financial gains. It is expected therefore that its long-term cost base will be lower than the current industry average, and the efficacy of its interventions higher. Hence the overall economic returns are expected to be at the higher end of the abovementioned spectrum.
Engage local communities from the start
WSUP projects will include effective community participation from the earliest stage of each project, effectively placing the potential ‘consumers’ at the helm in defining and designing appropriate water supply and sanitation service schemes that meet their needs and capacities. Social benefits will feature prominently in criteria for the acceptance of project feasibility studies and bidding proposals. Each project implementation plan will develop a tailored strategy on how to achieve this locally.
Promote community health
All projects will be supported by community programmes including hygiene behavioural change, and will aim to bridge the critical link between water supply, sanitation and community health.
Design for positive environmental impact
In scoping, designing and implementing sustainable water supply and sanitation it is vital to ensure that raw water sources - freshwater ecosystems such as rivers, lakes and wetlands (and related groundwater bodies) - and recipient water bodies are also managed in a sustainable manner. Well-designed urban water and sanitation services have the potential for highly positive environmental impacts. Negative impacts within the built environment can be avoided with good project design, particularly drainage. However, excessive water abstraction and the discharge of wastewaters or latrine and septic tank contents can be damaging to the environment.
In order to manage the environmental impacts of projects, the WSUP approach promotes Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) as the best tool, in keeping with the MDGs. This asks relevant stakeholders to agree on how to balance the needs of different water users, including the environment.
In all cases, WSUP activities will conform to appropriate local, national and international environmental standards.
Ensure long term sustainability through comprehensive capacity building
WSUP places a strong emphasis on building local skills and capacity from the outset in order to facilitate the ‘intelligent client’ or the ‘issues aware’ partner. This will aim to ensure not only successful project implementation but also the long-term commitment, knowledge and skills to deliver sustainable water and sanitation for the poor, including addressing local issues such as water losses, credit control, billing and collection operations, and delivering health benefits.
Provide a high quality service to local service authorities (LSAs)
Projects will be designed to have a rapid but high quality impact, typically with a limited duration of 3-5 years and sufficient to ensure long-term sustainability without committing WSUP members to long-term operations.
Since Project Consortia will be remunerated upon achievement of agreed performance targets, LSAs will be guaranteed a strong partnership with high quality service. They will also receive assistance from WSUP in the identification and securing of sources of funding.
Share learning and experience beyond WSUP
WSUP is committed to being open and transparent. Experiences will be shared internally across projects to foster organic growth and externally to help those involved in pro-poor development to improve their performance. The partnership model will be disseminated to encourage others to replicate its approach and join WSUP in increasing the overall scale of pro-poor development. WSUP will also utilise its experience and direct its advocacy efforts towards improving processes and policies that hinder efficient delivery of water and sanitation to the poor.
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