Sustainability Planning and Monitoring

ORGANIZING AND INTERPRETING THE DATATypical questions in this kind of analysis are:●●●●Which are the high, medium and lowperforming communities on sustainability? Oneffective use? On gender and social equity?On demand-responsiveness of services?Do these results match our own monitoringinformation? If not, why?What factors come out as strengths andweaknesses in the communities assessed? Aresome common to all or most communities?What do they indicate about the agency’sproject implementation approaches?An example of how the information presented inFigure 8 can be analyzed and interpreted isprovided here.Assuming that the 40 communities in Figure 8constitute a representative sample of communitiesserved by project Z, the bar charts indicate thefollowing trends:●●components. This trend, supported by fieldlevel findings in MPA assessments to date,reflects the assumption made in MPA scoring(Section 5.2) that all four components ofsustainability are interrelated and one poorlyfunctioning component drags down scoreson the rest, endangering overallsustainability. 16The opposite also seems true. The bestperforming systems are the ones where allfour components of sustainability get highscores.While scores on system quality (blue section ofbars) and effective functioning (red section) arecomparable across all communities, greatvariations are visible in terms of effectivefinancing (green) and effective management(yellow). This suggests that the project has inplace the means to ensure certain qualitystandards for technical aspects of water supplysystems (which affect effective functioning), butprobably has no standard approaches toensure the quality of community managementand adequate financing of operation andmaintenance by users.●●About 20 percent of the water supply systemsprovided are unlikely to be sustained (i.e.,have aggregate scores below the sustainabilitybenchmark score) and another 7-8 percent areborderline cases.It is difficult for community water supplysystems to be sustainable unless they achievea certain minimum (about half of themaximum score) score on all fourcomponents, i.e., system quality, effectivefunctioning, effective financing, and effectivemanagement. Those that fall below thebenchmark usually score either zero or verylow on at least one out of the fourImplications for changes in project approaches toenhance sustainability or the need for deeperinvestigations of specific issues can be deducedfrom findings such as above.Regrouping communities by the best and worstperformers (e.g., communities with the top andbottom 10 percent of scores) on specific aspectsand looking for explanatory differences betweenthem is another possible analysis. This oftenidentifies questions for further explanatoryinvestigation.Another type of possible analysis is looking for16 This means that in practice the aggregate sustainability score of community-managed systems cannot anddoes not exceed the minimum benchmark whenever any one component performs extremely poorly. Recognizingthis interrelated web of influences among the components, the MPA treats all four components of sustainabilitywith equal weights. This relationship however may not hold true for systems not managed and financed by usercommunities.56