Africa's WASH Nexus

Can community management (CM) be an effective and sustainable model for bottom-up WASH services? This post will discuss its methodology, strengths, limitations, and key success factors.  Methodology CM is based on the principle that communities should own, develop, operate, and maintain the services which they benefit from ( Harvey & Reed, 2006 ). Formally structured community committees are formed to take responsibility for these activities. Community members contribute regular fee payments and cash and in-kind resources upon service development ( Chowns, 2015 ).  Strengths Ideally, CM's first strength is in improving the technical performance of WASH services. With training, short distances, convenient communication, and staff motivation (as they benefit from better technical performance), the expectation is continuous, fast, and frequent maintenance, repairs, and tests. Secondly, CM offers a potential financial solution. Since community members can sense the effect of t...

This third post will discuss the reliance on and underperformance of bottom-up WASH services.   Fig.1 : Locationing Lukaya. Lukaya is a small town in Uganda (fig.1) that has experienced rapid population growth. Lukaya's WASH services heavily rely upon  bottom-up techniques  - 95% of its households use on-site sanitation facilities, primarily pit latrines, and almost all households (>99%) use on-site water supply, primarily  hand-dug wells ( Nayebare et al. 2020 ). Underperformance of water services Fig.2 : The 2017 JMP water service ladder . According to   the JMP standard  (fig.2), none of the water services are safely managed, 10% are unimproved, and 33% are limited due to waiting times over 30 minutes -  on average, 92 households share each of the 66 water facilities . Not reflected by using the JMP standard, water storage in open containers positioned on the floor by many households  risks contamination ( Mellor et al., 2014 ) . Curren...