Providing people with access to essential services such as water and sanitation demands a combination of solutions in the face of a wide range of problems. These include the need to rehabilitate obsolete infrastructure and grow existing networks, the more or less unplanned nature of urban development, population growth, climatic variations, water-borne disasters, the price of water, lack of specific sectoral policies, maintenance challenges, and so on. As well as purely technical solutions, NGOs today increasingly view the governance of water and sanitation as a fundamental condition for establishing lasting access to water, sanitation and hygiene for the people their projects are designed to benefit.
The goal of this manual is to:
a) provide a practical tool for implementing WASH Governance as part of WASH projects and programs, based on concrete examples from the field;
b) encourage other NGOs in the sector as well as water companies and partner institutions to incorporate and implement a governance element in their projects and programs, based on the OECD principles;
c) encourage other technical sectors beyond the WASH sector, and especially the ACF sectors, to explore the concept of governance as it impacts their fields of expertise and projects.
