This book offers insights into ways countries and individual organisations can move towards a service delivery approach and is a valuable resource for professionals in who are interested in improving the design and implementation of rural water supply programmes. Published in association with IRC.

Efforts to improve the water supplies used by people in rural areas of developing countries have run into serious obstacles: not only are public funds not available to build facilities for all, but many newly constructed facilities have fallen into disrepair and disuse. Along with the numerous failures there are also successes in this sector. From these successes a new view has begun to emerge of what the guiding principles of rural water supply strategies should be. This book brings together and spells out the constituents of this emerging view. The central message is that it is the local people themselves, not those trying to help them, who have the most important role to play. The community itself must be the primary decisionmaker, the primary investor, the primary organizer, and the primary overseer. The authors examine the implications of this primary principle for the main policy issues - the level of service to be provided in different settings, the level and mechanisms for cost recovery, the roles for the private and public sectors, and the role of women. The potential advantages of proceeding from this outlook, instead of the older top-down approaches, are considerable. Improvement efforts are more likely to meet felt needs, new facilities are more likely to be kept in service, and more communities are more likely to get safe water sooner.

This book is designed to assist those responsible for planning, implementing and supporting rural water supply prograames to increase sustainability.

Water projects in developing countries are inaugurated with great fanfare by the governments, lenders, and sponsors that make them possible; the projects' results, however, don't always receive the publicity of groundbreaking ceremonies. This study reports the findings of a multi-country research project intended to discover how such rural water supply (RWS) systems actually perform. Its emphasis was on how performance was affected by post-construction support (PCS) to communities after project completion. Information was collected from households, village water committees (VWCs), focus groups of residents, system operators, and key informants in rural communities in Bolivia, Ghana, and Peru. Approximately 10,000 individuals registered their opinions. The great majority of the systems were found to be performing well; the factors influencing their sustainability should help policy makers, investors, and managers around the globe who plan rural water systems.

This book is for those who are in charge of facilitating community management of water supplies. It provides guidelines and food for thought for managers and decision-makers who want to improve the performance of their organization and make sure that water supply services in place keep working. It answers such questions as: what kind of support do communities require? How can this support be provided? What are the organizational conditions we need to put in place? What tools can we use? Who should be involved? What does it demand from support organizations and the communities? In other words: what does it take to support community management of water supplies.