Scaling Up Multiple Use Water Services presents new conceptual and empirical insights in the role of accountability for better performance of the public water services sector. It analyses experiences in the past decades of piloting and scaling Multiple Use water Services (MUS)

This research report presents the findings of the first phase of the action-research project "Models for implementing multiple-use water supply systems for enhanced land and water productivity, rural livelihoods and gender equity." Multipleuse water services, or "mus" in short, is a participatory, integrated and poverty-reduction focused approach in poor rural and peri-urban areas, which takes people's multiple water needs as a starting point for providing integrated services, moving beyond the conventional sectoral barriers of the domestic and productive sectors.

Water is an indispensable resource that lies at the heart of sustenance and prosperity for communities worldwide. In low- and middle-income countries, households and communities have long relied on a single water source to fulfil a multitude of needs, encompassing drinking, washing, cooking, livestock raising, and irrigation. Traditional water supply systems have served as hydraulic structures for multiple purposes, catering to diverse water requirements. As countries progressed towards modernization, the emphasis shifted towards single-use water infrastructure, inadvertently neglecting the multifaceted nature of water demands that contribute to people's livelihoods. In developing countries, water resources management centered around large-scale irrigation and water development projects to spur economic growth. Infrastructure, institutions, policies, and practices were organized around single-use sectors. Consequently, prevailing models of water modernization unintentionally disregarded or even discouraged the acknowledgement of multiple uses.

Scaling Up Multiple Use Water Services presents new conceptual and empirical insights in the role of accountability for better performance of the public water services sector. It analyses experiences in the past decades of piloting and scaling Multiple Use water Services (MUS)

The supply of reliable and safe water is a key challenge for developing countries, particularly India. Community management has long been the declared model for rural water supply and is recognised to be critical for its implementation and success. Based on 20 detailed successful case studies from across India, this book outlines future rural water supply approaches for all lower-income countries as they start to follow India on the economic growth (and subsequent service levels) transition. The case studies cover state-level wealth varying from US$2,600 to US$10,000 GDP per person and a mix of gravity flow, single village and multi-village groundwater and surface water schemes. The research reported covers 17 states and surveys of 2,400 households. Together, they provide a spread of cases directly relevant to policy-makers in lower-income economies planning to upgrade the quality and sustainability of rural water supply to meet the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly in the context of economic growth.

Poor people in developing countries need water for many purposes: for drinking, bathing, irrigating vegetable gardens, and watering livestock. However, responsibility for water services is divided between different government agencies, the WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) and irrigation sub-sectors, with the result that people's holistic needs are not met. Multiple use water services (MUS) is a participatory water services approach that takes account of poor people's multiple water needs as a starting point of planning, and the approach has been implemented in at least 22 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Scaling up Multiple Use Water Services argues that by designing cost-effective multi-purpose infrastructure MUS can have a positive impact on people's health and livelihoods. It analyses and explains the success factors of MUS, using a framework of accountability for public service delivery, and it also examines why there has been resistance against scaling up MUS. A stronger service delivery approach can overcome this resistance, by rewarding more livelihood outcomes, by fostering discretionary decision-making power of local-level staff and by allowing horizontal coordination. This book should be read by government and aid agency policy makers in the WASH and agriculture sectors, by development field workers, and by academics, researchers and students of international development.