The effective expenditures on 842 handpumps composing 192 rural water services are compared to the national guidelines available in Burkina Faso. Two gaps are identified: post-construction expenditures don’t match with national guidelines (operating costs and rehabilitation being 50% and 150% higher than planned) and the highest recurrent cost, direct support, is missing as a cost category in national guidelines.

The under- estimation of recurrent expenditure undermines the assumptions made in the sector in Burkina Faso on the appropriate scale to manage water services that last.

Functionality of handumps is decreasing because the high maintenance of handpumps is financially unviable at village scale as established by the regulations. Whatever age, type of pump, management model and location, a handump requires higher capital maintenance than expected, that is one intervention every 3 years, each costing an average of FCFA 150,000 or US$300 which equals 2 years of the service provider theoretical turnover per handpump.

A change in the scale of high maintenance financing could improve serviceability of handpumps with unchanged water tariff.

The paper is in French and includes an executive summary in English.

Pezon, C. and Bassono, R., 2013. Le coût de l’approvisionnement en eau par PMH au Sahel. The Hague, The Netherlands, IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre. Available at: http://washurl.net/c04x8b

This portal was launched in October 2011 by the US Foundation Center as a collaborative platform for philanthropic foundations that fund water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) projects around the world.

The centre piece is an interactive map showing which foundation funds what where.  Currently projects from hundreds of foundations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, Howard G. Buffett Foundation and Skoll Foundation, are included. There are country profiles listing foundation grants, WASH indicators and historical OECD bilateral and multilateral grant data.

Besides the interactive map, the portal provides news and resources for grantmakers such as case studies, recommended reading and overview of key organisations and monitoring tools.

Website: washfunders.org

A new free and open source knowledge portal has been launched by Akvo and IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre. It is designed to help water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) teams achieve sustainable financing throughout the entire life-cycle of WASH services.

What WASH costs do I need to finance? How can I finance WASH services and how can I monitor the financing of these services? These are the questions that the new WASH Finance Portal attempts to answer at: akvo.org/wiki/index.php/Finance_Portal

The WASH Finance Portal is an extension of the popular Akvopedia online knowledge tool, intended for those working to establish basic water and sanitation infrastructure and services for the world’s poorest people. Akvopedia contains nearly 800 articles. In 2012, the site attracted 300.000 visitors and 1.1 million page views with an expected growth of more than 50% in 2013.

Much of the material in the Finance Portal is sourced from the IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre, especially from its WASHCost programme. This five year action research programme (2008-2012) gathered information related to the life-cycle costs of providing WASH services.

In addition to the articles about different types of costs, financing sources and monitoring tools, the Finance Portal includes a database of funds that are available for WASH projects or businesses in developing countries. You will also find links to the latest questions on finance from question and answer forum KnowledgePoint, and the latest finance news and publications from IRC’s MySource newsfeed. In this way the new Finance Portal provides valuable information and connects people.

Later in 2013, Akvo plans to launch a Sustainability and an Emergency portal.

The Finance Portal remains a work in progress, we welcome your comments and suggestions for updates.

Akvo is a non-profit foundation, with staff in the Netherlands, Britain, Sweden, Kenya, India and the United States. The open source tools that it develops are used by over 800 organisations throughout the world in areas such as WASH, education and economic development.

IRC is a knowledge-focused NGO, which works with a worldwide network of partner organisations in order to achieve equitable and sustainable WASH services.

The Finance Portal is one of the products of a three-year collaboration agreement between Akvo and IRC, which was formalised by a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed in 2012.

Watch the Akvo’s Jeroen van der Sommen and IRC’s Jeske Verhoeven launch the Akvopedia WASH Finance portal on WaterCouch.tv, during the multi-stakeholder dialogue on water on 21 March 2013.

Originally published in E-Source, 22 Mar 2013

Reblogged from WASH news Africa:

Reblogged from WASH news Latin America and Caribbean:

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A Dutch-funded project aims to bring piped drinking water to peri-urban neighbourhoods of the Bolivian capital La Paz. What will determine its success? Is it the inhabitants’ willingness and ability to pay for improved water services? No, the biggest threat to the sustainability of the project is the lack of a national sector strategy that clearly outlines how to finance the full costs of service delivery.

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Dear Matt,

I enjoyed your video on water.org about going on a toilet strike. It is great that you are so passionate about realizing access to safe water, sanitation and hygiene for all. I personally also like it that you bring in some humor into our sometimes very boring sector.

In your video you mention that it costs $25 USD to provide a person with sanitation for life. This is not true. Over the past four years IRC’s WASHCost project in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Andhra Pradesh (India) and Mozambique has collected, validated and analysed cost and service level information for water, sanitation and hygiene. Based on this research we know that for $ 25 USD you can construct a traditional pit latrine with an impermeable slab which provides a basic service. In order to sustain the service provided by that traditional pit latrine it costs between $ 1.5 and $ 4 USD per person per year – so to provide sanitation for life means finding that 1.5-4USD every year …. for life. If you do not know how, or by who, these recurrent costs will be financed, it is very likely that the latrine you are constructing today will break down or not used within two to three years, wasting your investment.

If you would like to know more about how you can better plan, budget and monitor for sustainable services, join our free online Costing Sustainable Services course. In this online course you can  discuss with IRC staff and meet 600 water sector professionals from around the world interested in planning and budgeting for sustainable and equitable water, sanitation and hygiene services, using a life-cycle cost approach. The course is accessible 24 hours per day and you can follow it at your own pace so it is easy to combine with your other work.

Of course nothing beats a face-face exchanging of ideas, so you are always welcome to visit us at our office in The Hague, The Netherlands, or participate in one of our workshops on costing sustainable services. The next workshop is in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on Friday 12 April connected to the Monitoring Sustainable WASH Service Delivery Symposium.

Hope to hear from you soon,

Kind regards,

Jeske Verhoeven

Programme Officer

IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre

In reality, only half of the villagers receive a basic level of service and half a limited if any service at all. The provision of a basic water service by a small network costs 9 times more in investment and 54 times more in operation and maintenance than a similar level of service provided by a handpump.

These are some of the findings in a new working paper by Dr Christelle Pezon from IRC’s WASHCost project, which describes the analytical framework and the methodological tools developed to cost rural water service levels.

Pezon, C., 2012. Evaluer le coût d’un service pérenne d’eau potable au Burkina Faso: méthodes et outils. (WASHCost document de travail ; n°5). The Hague, The Netherlands, IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre. Available at: www.washcost.info/page/2663

For more on WASHCost Burkina Faso see: www.washcost.info/page/475

Visit the WASHCost campaign page: campaign.washcost.info

Reblogged from Sanitation Updates:

The authors caution that the costs provided in the publication are for illustrative purposes only and do not reflect the wide variety of situations and practices encountered in the different countries
in sub-Saharan Africa.

The guide is organized into five chapters:

• The chapter ‘Categories of sanitation costs and expenditure’ provides a detailed list of the different components that need to be financed for each segment of the sanitation chain. Indicative cost estimates are also given here;

• The chapter ‘Financing transversal activities’ presents the various possible means of financing the activities and tools necessary for managing and supervising the entire sanitation sector (notably the intervention strategy and the monitoring and evaluation mechanism);

• The chapter ‘Financing access to sanitation’ details the different strategies available  for financing the access segment of the sanitation chain;

• The chapter ‘Financing the evacuation of wastewater and excreta’ presents the various means of financing the second segment in the chain, drawing a distinction between on-site sanitation and small piped sewerage systems;

• The chapter ‘Financing the disposal and/or treatment of wastewater, excreta and sludge products’ details the strategies available for financing the disposal and treatment segment of the sanitation chain.

Lastly, the ‘Financing Sanitation Overview’ contains a summarized and simplified version of all of the financing mechanisms presented in the guide. [author abstract]

Désille, D., Le Jallé , C., Toubkiss, J. and Valfrey, B., 2011. Financing sanitation in Sub-Saharan Africa . (Concerted Municipal Strategies [CMS] methodological guides on water and sanitation : six methodological guides; 6). [online] Paris, France: pS-Eau, Programme Solidarite Eau. 77 p.; ill.; 14 tab.; 5 fig.; 10 boxes
Available at: <http://washurl.net/dz4psq>

Reblogged from Sanitation Updates:

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Sustaining sanitation is much more expensive than building latrines. The 20-year cost of sustaining a basic level sanitation service per person in certain countries is anywhere from 5-20 times the cost per person of building the latrine in the first place.

This is one of the key findings on costing sustainable sanitation services, which are being highlighted in the first month of the 

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