Sustainability Planning and Monitoring

DO PROJECT RULES PROMOTE SUSTAINABILITY AND EQUITY?Projects, process, and watersystemsThree projects - the Village Infrastructure Project Iand II (VIP) and the first Kecamatan DevelopmentProject (KDP 1) funded by the World Bank, andthe Village Infrastructure Project funded by theOverseas Economic Cooperation Fund of Japan(OECF) - were multi-sectoral poverty reductionprojects with water supplies as one of several publicinfrastructure choices. The other two projects - theWater Supply and Sanitation for Low IncomeCommunities (WSLIC) Project funded by the WorldBank, and the Asian Development Bank-assistedRural Water Supply and Sanitation (RWSS) Projectofferedonly water supply and sanitation.Six teams of four MPA facilitators each assistedthe communities between March and June 2001.All team leaders had prior experience with theMPA. Only the community level MPA indicatorswere used. Project documents and reports werereviewed to compare objectives, rules, andapproaches, and some project personnel wereinterviewed to clarify how the projects worked inpractice.The community sample was not completelyrepresentative. It included user communities thatwere willing to devote time for assessments of theirwater systems, and since that is rarely the case fornon-functioning systems, the sample left outcompletely broken down ones. It likely includedthe better of the WSLIC, VIP and, in Jambi, theRWSS water systems. The KDP and OECF-assistedvillages and the RWSS villages from south Sumatraare the “available” villages in the geographicalarea, because there were few water projects fromwhich to select. Hence, the lessons learned mostlikely show the best picture. No tests of statisticalsignificance were performed for this analysis andthe results do not represent a comparativeevaluation of the projects. The focus of theexploration was on the variations in project rulesand the outcomes associated with them.Thirty water systems relied on gravity-flow pipeddistribution, six had pumping systems, and fourused simpler technologies such as dug wells,handpumps, and rainwater collection. Theaverage number of households per communitywas 290 with a range from 83 to 639. WSLICsystems had been in existence the longest, anaverage of five years; KDP systems for the shortesttime, just over two years on average.Three main positive findings1. Despite the projects’ lack ofemphasis on sustainability,sustainability was average orbetter.Only WSLIC had an explicit sustainability objective.Sustainability was one of five project principles forKDP. Sustainability in RWSS and VIP was expectedto result from community ownership. Despite thislack of emphasis, sustainability of the water supplysystems was gratifying. 80 percent, or 32 of the40 communities achieved a score of at least 200out of 400, the point below which sustainability isin doubt, although three of those 32 scored juston the borderline of sustainability (Figure 10).2. Active and trained communitywater managementorganizations do better onsustainability, local managementand financing, and expansion ofaccess and convenience.The strong performance probably reflects growingcapacity and awareness within communities, ofwhat it takes to achieve sustainability, after manysuccessive development efforts. Although only thewater sector projects routinely set up managementarrangements, all of the communities in the upper80 percent had some provision - mostly watermanagement organizations (WMOs) - to ensuremaintenance and repair over time. If the projectdid not help the community establish a WMO,96