A study on the effectiveness of Asian Development Bank funded water and sanitation projects in ensuring sustainable services for the poor The Synthesis Report Water for All ? (original) (raw)
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Water, Sanitation and Health in Developing Countries: How Far from Sustainable Development?
World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology, International Journal of Social, Behavioral, Educational, Economic, Business and Industrial Engineering, 2011
The availability of water in adequate quantity and quality is imperative for sustainable development. Worldwide, significant imbalance exists with regards to sustainable development particularly from a water and sanitation perspective. Water is a critical component of public health, and failure to supply safe water will place a heavy burden on the entire population. Although the 21 st century has witnessed wealth and advanced development, it has not been realized everywhere. Billions of people are still striving to access the most basic human needs which are food, shelter, safe drinking water and adequate sanitation. The global picture conceals various inequalities particularly with regards to sanitation coverage in rural and urban areas. Currently, water scarcity and in particular water governance is the main challenge which will cause a threat to sustainable development goals. Within the context of water, sanitation and health, sustainable development is a confusing concept primarily when examined from the viewpoint of policy options for developing countries. This perspective paper aims to summarize and critically evaluate evidence of published studies in relation to water, sanitation and health and to identify relevant solutions to reduce public health impacts. Evidently, improving water and sanitation services will result in significant and lasting gains in health and economic development.
The Environmentalist, 2003
Since the establishment, following World War II, of the ‘World System,’ by which the affluent industrialized countries established various international assistance agencies (including the multilateral development banks, UN affiliates, and Bilaterals), these assistance agencies have invested very large sums in helping finance planning and construction of community sewerage and water supply facilities in the developing countries. However, much of this large investment has been ineffective and wasted, primarily because of the lack of understanding by the staff of the assistance agencies that the design criteria for the facilities must be modified to suit the socio-economic status of the developing country. The developing countries are relatively very poor in terms of available finances, hence cannot afford to emulate Western environmental standards and design practices, especially as related to operation and maintenance, hence much simpler approaches must be used. Experiences in several Asian countries are discussed, and a recommendation is made on how to go about resolving this problem.
Drinking water and sanitation: progress in 73 countries in relation to socioeconomic indicators
Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 2015
access-to allow countries to be compared, regardless of their initial coverage levels. Methods Data sources We obtained estimates of the percentage of national populations with access to improved sanitation and water-for various years between 2000 and 2012-from the 2013 Country Files of the Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation 12-which were the most up-to-date information available at the time of analyses. This World Health Organization/United Nations Children's Fund programme compiles the results of nationally representative surveys, including Demographic and Health Surveys, Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys, World Health Surveys and national censuses. We considered only data from 2000 onwards to reflect the progress countries made since the MDGs were set in the year 2000. We included shared toilet facilities in our improved-sanitation category because data for both shared sanitation and total improved sanitation including shared sanitation-i.e. the two data sets needed to investigate total improved sanitation excluding shared sanitation-were only available for four of our study countries. The Joint Monitoring Programme currently discounts shared sanitation from total improved sanitation by applying a fixed ratio for each country. 13 However, since these ratios are based on data that may have been collected before 2000 and, for some countries, are based on a single data point, we decided not to use them-or any other similar correction factor-in our analyses. We included countries with at least five data points that covered at least three different years. Multiple survey data points from any one year were treated independently. Objective To assess progress in the provision of drinking water and sanitation in relation to national socioeconomic indicators. Methods We used household survey data for 73 countries-collected between 2000 and 2012-to calculate linear rates of change in population access to improved drinking water (n = 67) and/or sanitation (n = 61). To enable comparison of progress between countries with different initial levels of access, the calculated rates of change were normalized to fall between-1 and 1. In regression analyses, we investigated associations between the normalized rates of change in population access and national socioeconomic indicators: gross national income per capita, government effectiveness, official development assistance, freshwater resources, education, poverty, Gini coefficient, child mortality and the human development index. Findings The normalized rates of change indicated that most of the investigated countries were making progress towards achieving universal access to improved drinking water and sanitation. However, only about a third showed a level of progress that was at least half the maximum achievable level. The normalized rates of change did not appear to be correlated with any of the national indicators that we investigated. Conclusion In many countries, the progress being made towards universal access to improved drinking water and sanitation is falling well short of the maximum achievable level. Progress does not appear to be correlated with a country's social and economic characteristics. The between-country variations observed in such progress may be linked to variations in government policies and in the institutional commitment and capacity needed to execute such policies effectively.
The challenge of improving water and sanitation services in less developed countries
2009
This paper argues that there are many challenges to designing and implementing water and sanitation interventions that actually deliver economic benefits to the households in developing countries. Perhaps most critical to successful water and sanitation investments is to discover and implement forms of service and payment mechanisms that will render the improvements worthwhile for those who must pay for them. In this paper, we argue that, in many cases, the conventional network technologies of water supply and sanitation will fail this test, and that poor households need alternative, non-network technologies. However, it will not necessarily be the case that specific non-network improved water supply and/or sanitation technologies will always be seen as worthwhile by those who must pay for them. We argue that there is no easy panacea to resolve this situation. For any intervention, the outcome is likely to be context-dependent. An intervention that works well in one locality may fail miserably in another. For any given technology, the outcome will depend on economic and social conditions, including how it is implemented, by whom, and often on the extent to which complementary behavioral, institutional and organizational changes also occur. For this reason, we warn against excessive generalization: one cannot, in our view, say that one intervention yields a rate of return of x% while another yields a return of y%, because the economic returns are likely to vary with local circumstances. More important is to identify the circumstances under which an intervention is more or less likely to succeed. Also for this reason, when we analyze a few selected water and sanitation interventions, we employ a probabilistic rather than a deterministic analysis to emphasize that real world outcomes are likely to vary substantially.