Development and Cooperation


	Contributions from the Column Tribune Drinking water projects – blockades, myths, illusions From the rent economy to the violence economy 01/2003		Drinking water projects – blockades, myths, illusions From Kay E. Ehlers Drinking water projects are regarded as especially important, but often have crucial shortcomings. The main reason is that they are planned by engineers as technical projects, and their social context is overlooked. Supply of clean drinking water plays an important role in development policy. When poverty alleviation, social policy or healthcare is talked about, clean drinking water is always mentioned. Politicians involved in development like to boast that yet another new project has been promoted: “Drinking water provided for 100,000 people.” But even this formulation is revealing. Drinking water systems are built, drinking water is supplied – but the question is: whether and how the target groups use the offer? Is the operation of the drinking water systems ensured in the long run – in technical, organisational and economic terms? True, the feasibility studies of Financial Cooperation (FC) ask these questions, but all too often they are answered purely schematically. The result is that drinking water projects (especially those in urban areas) frequently fail to come up to expectations because they do not really reach the target groups, the proceeds from sales of water do not even cover overheads, maintenance is poor, and costly rehabilitation work must be undertaken after only a few years. What factors play a role in this sad situation? Planning according to technical criteria Urban drinking water projects are characterised mostly by rigid planning in terms of quantity and concept. The planning parameters are population figures, population growth, the reachable proportion of the population, and normatively set per capita consumption. On the basis of these figures a forecast for a required production volume is produced, upon which the technical detailed planning is aligned. This is why the projects conceived are mostly large-scale ones that cannot be handled by the project executing organisations (or water suppliers) without the know-how of foreign experts. More appropriate than such purely new building projects would almost always be a successive, continual expansion of water supply networks according to the development of demand. This means stretching a project over a longer period and having it implemented by the local supply organisation, meaning in turn that it would also conform to the development of the organisation’s efficiency. The problem of wrong forecasts of the demand for drinking water would then hardly arise because the offer could follow the actual existing demand and under-utilisation of capacity would be easier to avoid. With such a procedure the costs per capita of the population supplied would certainly be higher than the (theoretical) per capita costs of a thoroughly planned large-scale project. But since such a project would present greater prospects of sustainability, efficiency would in the final analysis be higher. A paradigm change of this kind would require some rethinking. At the financing institutions, the competence for decisions on drinking water projects is very much in the hands of engineers, who make judgments both on the complex questions of the efficiency of the project executing organisation and the likely development of the demand for drinking water. Therefore non-technical aspects usually have less light shed on them, and the typically engineer’s way of seeing things dominates the design of the infrastructure in the sense of inflexible and large-volume planning practice. But that means the projects are subject to the risk of being wrongly constructed. It is not the technical considerations that must come first. Instead, the initial step must be a full examination, open to all findings and relevant to the decisions to be taken, of whether the project executing organisation’s structure and the general political conditions under which it operates allow projects to achieve sustainable success not only technically but also in organisational and economic terms. That is frequently not the case. Moreover, in the course of a such a scrutiny one would quickly come across structures similar to those in the financing institutions themselves – drinking water supply in the developing countries lies mainly in the hands of engineers and technicians who perceive their task as one of a purely technical challenge. That is why the system of the project executing organisation’s structure and operations would not be investigated sufficiently. Staff and model development or cost accounting also are hardly the subject of strategic agreements between financing institutions and project executing organisations. By contrast, the training of technical personnel – which is certainly necessary – is funded without delay. Another omission is even more grave: the target groups’ demand for drinking water is also not examined sufficiently. Rather, the planning for per capita consumption is laid down on a normative basis. Market research and marketing, an active reaching out to the target groups, are unknown in these bureaucratic-type organisations. They know too little about their clients, believe they cannot in any case change the rates structure, and have become used to financial deficits in supplying drinking water. The so-called promotion of the project executing organisations (renforcement institutionnel, etc.) also almost always misses this fundamental range of problems. Once a technical design has been planned, examinations and discussions are aligned more on pushing it through. For instance, if it is ascertained that the target group has many wells with good water and there is possibly even an extensive system of itinerant water-sellers, no-one takes the decision not to implement a drinking water project or even to strengthen the well supply and the itinerant traders. Instead, it is more likely that funds are made available for a sensitising campaign aimed at pointing out to the target group the yet better quality of the project’s drinking water. Demand is generated by “sensitising” The general conditions outlined above are reflected in those aspects of many drinking water projects that are described as “backup measures”, as if it were about issues of little significance. The sensitising campaigns are a good example. They are aimed at popularising the consumption of clean drinking water. In many projects, sensitisation is narrowed down to the health aspects of drinking water consumption. It is, of course, true that every year millions of people become ill and die due to contaminated water. However, this should not occupy an exclusive position in the sensitising campaigns for drinking water. The decision to consume drinking water depends in no way - not even first and foremost – on knowledge of diseases induced by it. At least equally important are other factors such as user comfort and basic information on prices, application procedures and options for terminating water supply agreements. Not a few of the potential customers have unrealistic ideas about prices and charges. Instead of addressing these promising starting points, a paralysing, health education encrustation prevails. Why target groups consume clean drinking water is, however, secondary. The main thing is that they do so. The health education paradigm is concomitant with a special organisational structure background. Often, sensitising campaigns are not implemented by the infrastructure executing organisations, but by others that allegedly know more about them. Rated highly here by the decisiontakers on both the donor and recipient sides are health services and NGOs, which supposedly are “closer to the people”. Unfortunately, this practice means that the project executing organisations do not perceive a marketing aspect that is central for their survivability, nor can they develop any competence in this field. In addition, the suitability of the organisations named above for marketing tasks is often enough doubtful, and in organisational terms a faulty design right from the start. Given perspectives limited to the timing of the project, they are to actively and successfully look after the interests of project executing organisations that declare themselves incapable of dealing with marketing questions and target group problems? That is hardly ever successful and shows the conceptual weaknesses of infrastructure projects in which the non-engineering aspects are not taken into appropriate account. Household connections or public standpipes? Another marketing shortcoming is often the inefficient distribution of drinking water. In the case of urban drinking water supply projects, there are essentially two ways of delivering water to consumers: via public standpipes or household connections. The latter are much more attractive for the target groups, particularly from the aspect of comfort, a fact which project planners like to ignore. Using well-meant ‘welfare state’ arguments, they prefer standpipes. The standard argument, which has not been proved empirically, is that poorer sections of the population cannot afford household connections. By contrast, what has in fact been empirically proved is that the project executing organisations often cannot cope with the direct or indirect administration of the standpipes, and that effective marketing of household connections is impeded. These connections, however, could be precisely the means to solve the apparent problem of the underprivileged poorer sections of the population. One must only spread the message that every owner of a household connection may sell water to anyone and, in fact, should do so. Reselling water on a neighbourly basis is done at many places anyhow, legally or illegally. Against this background, investments in standpipes, which in many projects must be rehabilitated after only a short time, can be seen even more clearly as bad ones. A theoretical level argument in favour of standpipes, which cannot be denied, are their lower per capita costs compared to household connections. But in practice that is countered by serious disadvantages. These include not only the maintenance problem; the demand for water and the people’s willingness to pay for this offer are decisively lesser because from the target groups’ viewpoint the public standpipes do not differ enough from wells or surface water. This distribution concept mostly delivers no economic sustainability. Another argument put forward from time to time is that standpipes are the only place where women can communicate with each other undisturbed. At least in the African context, this assertion is probably unfounded and can hardly determine the technical design of a distribution system - including in view of the time involved in fetching water and its implications of harmful effects on the women’s health. The concept of cheap rates for household connections (branchements sociaux) also has not been thought through sufficiently. These rates often are made available at the wish of the financing institutions in order to boost demand for new water supply systems or when existing networks are expanded, and thus prove successes in the development of consumption. Officially, cheaper household connections enable socially disadvantaged sections of the population to have one as well (the same argument that is used for standpipes). Actually, however, the users who benefit from them are usually those who have good connections to the decision-makers. Moreover, potential new customers are talked into waiting until further cheap connections are provided, which paradoxically tends to reduce demand and results in its erratic development as a whole. An ongoing marketing of water is thus impeded unnecessarily. In addition, it is noted that many water suppliers hinder their own marketing by excessive connection charges – as if their actual business was selling connection equipment; this also does not promote the development of demand. Other problems are created by, among other things, rigid rate structures (with extra complications in the case of simultaneous distribution of water via household connections and standpipes) which do not reflect the market situation, efforts to achieve what is often more a ritual target group participation (although this applies more to rural water supply projects), and extraneous influence (such as in selecting the towns that are to benefit from a project). These negative factors also have a greater impact the more a project is conceived and implemented with a technical weighting. How can things be improved? The observations outlined here relate to projects of various financing organisations, particularly in West Africa, as well as to other experiences in North Africa and Asia. Obviously, they do not apply to all projects – individual positive examples can certainly be found. But in my view the observations do pertain to the general character of this project sector. In the triangle between conservative financing institutions, dependent recipients and consulting companies that are tied to calls for tenders, a scarcely creative structure of “traditions” and accepted methods has developed, remote from the target groups and self-referential, which uses the term sustainability but does not promote sufficiently the preconditions for achieving it. To break open this structure, it would be necessary that Financial Cooperation projects also were not put in the corset of a fixed timetable but given time to develop themselves organically. Drinking water projects should not be conceived as “the great success”, but make headway bit by bit, and the project executing organisations should be much more responsible for them than has usually been the case to date. Above all, the concept of such projects, besides the technical side, must give equal weight to the aspects of the organisational development of the project executing organisations and the marketing of water. Kay E. Ehlers, trained as a civil engineer and sociologist, has worked in FC drinking water projects since 1987. He is currently working as a planner and organisation developer in the Hamburg public administration. (kaye.ehlers@t-online.de)