Hydraulic ram pumps and Sling Pumps

Key Factors for Sustainable Cost RecoveryIntroductionContext and historical perspectiveCost recovery is still today one of the major obstacles to achieving a sustainable drinking water supplyin developing countries, despite major efforts in the sector over the past decades.The Expert Meeting on Cost Recovery 1 held in Delft, in January 2001, and a literature review of thesubject, have highlighted a number of major problems concerning cost recovery:• obtaining good cost data on water supply and sanitation,• the need to differentiate between capital and recurrent costs,• lack of awareness by communities of the costs of safe water and sanitation and who is responsiblefor meeting them,• methodological problems with studies on willingness to pay and demand,• knowing how to derive equitable tariffs from willingness to pay and demand studies,• tariffs do not cover all costs,• equity objectives are rarely taken into account in existing cost recovery principles,• poor regulation and enforcement,• monopoly problems, political interference and cultures of non-payment,• poor management capacity of communities,• misuse of funds.It was thought 2 for a time in the 1970s that appropriate technology that communities could affordwould contribute to solving the problem. The 1980s brought an understanding of communityinvolvement that grew later into community management and gender awareness. Communityfinancing came to be considered as a community affair, which communities could resolve, if they weregiven responsibility for it, and if they participated in the whole project cycle. In the early 1990s, theInternational Community stated in Dublin that “water has an economic value in all its competing usesand that it should be recognised as an economic good”. This was the springboard for a new era duringwhich professionals took various positions.Economists argue that “the basic principle behind user charges (urban or rural) is that users should paythe economic cost of water services, as the economic price of water should ensure the optimumeconomic efficiency of water charges. The appropriate cost for users to pay is the long run marginaleconomic cost, which is approximated by the average incremental cost derived from the least costmethod analysis 3 ”. However, rural or low-income urban communities who are managing their systemhave problems in understanding this language and applying its concept. Social scientists give an“emphasis on water as a basic need 4” and fear the economic approach as a possible threat to equity, asit does not fully allow for the social dimension. Environmentalists agree that “managing water as aneconomic good is an important way of encouraging conservation and protection of water resources 5 ”,mainly by including the cost of preserving water in user charges and by applying the principle of thepolluter pays. Governments and municipalities, who are going bankrupt because consumers don’t payfor services, apply the “principle of ‘user pays’ so strictly that the plight of the poor is overlooked 6 ”.Furthermore, when considering specifically drinking water and not water resources in general, sectorprofessionals today prefer to mention water as a social and economic good rather than only as aneconomic good. According to this view, it is not water but the services involved in providing safewater that have a price; hence water should be considered as a commodity rather than as a good.123456Organised by IHE and IRCAdapted from Poverty and water supply and sanitation services, by Len Abrams, 1999From Handbook for the Economic Analysis of Water Supply Projects, Asian Development Bank, 1999. Page190.From Water as an economic good, by Desmond Mc Neil. In: Vision 21 : Water for People.From Dublin Statement, 1992, extract of principle 4.From Cost recovery at all costs ? in Maru A Pula, Issue N. 16, March 2000.1