Sustainability Planning and Monitoring

THE CHALLENGE OF SUSTAINED WATER SUPPLY AND SANITATION FOR ALLfinancing systems. If local women and men andtheir organizations are themselves sustaining andmanaging improved water supply and sanitationprojects, they can no longer be treated as mererecipients of government designed and builttechnologies based on the decisions of outsiders.of participatory methods and tools. Only then is itpossible for all parties involved to share theirknowledge and experiences, learn from each otherand make the best use of the pooled knowledgein planning new water supply and sanitationsystems or improve existing ones.Instead, the community’s women and men becomethe local planners and managers and the externalproject agencies become their facilitators. In thisnew set-up, the future users have the freedom andthe responsibility to make their own well-reasoneddecisions and management arrangements. Theyalso have the right to receive the information andsupport that they need from the projectimplementing agencies to plan, implement andrun their services in an effective and efficientmanner.This does not mean that the implementing agencieshave a less important role. On the contrary, theirrole is now even more crucial. Agency managersand staff must develop processes of consultationand support. They must also help local womenand men develop the additional capacities neededto plan, implement, and manage their communitywater supplies and their sanitation projects.In their turn, the agency staff learn from thecommunity members what may be the best fittingsolutions in the given socio-cultural, economic,institutional, environmental, and technicalcircumstances. They also get useful insights fromlocal users and managers as to whether and whycertain approaches and choices have, or have not,worked.In decentralized systems, because local womenand men would operate, manage, and sustainthe improved services, planning requires the useThe principles of participatory learning and actionapply to all stages of a project cycle:●●●When planning new services, they facilitatebetter decision making, based on experienceswith existing water supply and sanitationconditions.During operations, they help monitor, andwhere necessary improve, the installed waterand sanitation systems and projectmanagement approaches.While evaluating completed projects orprograms, they make it possible to assessimpacts of investments and make moreeffective decisions about new investments andstrategies.A range of methods and tools is available forparticipatory learning and action. PROWWESS, theproject for the Promotion of the Role of Women inWater and Environmental Sanitation Servicessupported by the United Nations DevelopmentProgramme (UNDP) and the World Bank, hasdeveloped tools for participatory planning,monitoring and evaluation of community waterand sanitation facilities (Srinivasan, 1990).More recently, they were supplemented byParticipatory Hygiene and SanitationTransformation (PHAST), a toolkit specially gearedto community planning and monitoring ofPlanning and monitoring for sustainability calls for indicators and tools to track gender andsocial equity in the way projects assess and elicit users’ demands and respond to them.5