The challenges of attaining universal access to water and sanitation services
One of the Millennium Development Goals established by the international community in the water sector is to reduce by half the number of people deprived of these essential services by 2015.
Nearly a billion people have difficulty accessing clean water (20 litres per person per day less than one kilometre from one’s place of residence).
More than 2.5 billion people do not have any sanitation system, even basic.
Although the goal remains attainable with regard to access to drinking water, Africa notwithstanding, the sanitation objective appears to be deeply compromised.
The crucial issues at stake for urban water and sanitation services
The development of urban services has to support the high growth of metropolitan areas, in which over 60% of the world population will live in 2030 (approximately 5 billion people).
Cities must ensure that underprivileged inhabitants have access to drinking water, when the number of people living in shantytowns could increase from one billion today to over two billion in 2020, mainly in the developing countries. The inhabitants of shantytowns already represent 40% of the urban population.
Urban services are faced with a series of major challenges:
- to extend access to drinking water and sanitation to all, in particular to the poorest of the poor, by implementing innovative socio-economic and technical solutions, taking into account the fact that in no country in the world can unconnected inhabitants pay the full price for network services (i.e. covering the costs of basic infrastructures), which require a return on investment spread over two or three generations.
- to find a balance between water resources and needs by controlling demand and losses, thereby reducing the need to leverage new resources with increasingly high financial and environmental costs that are difficult to bear in the long term.
- to offer quality services (with particular respect to drinking water compliant with WHO standards) althougn adapted to the local socio-economic situation.
- to make progress towards the goal of long-term technical and financial sustainability for the service through :
- pricing which reduces financial dependence (in particular for operation and maintenance activities)
- professional business management, including activities such as fraud reduction, invoicing and collecting
- rigorous management of human and financial resources
- maintenance and development of the technical (infrastructures) and human (human resources, skills) assets
The management and organisational models promoted by financial backers in the 1980s and 1990s (privatisation of the services or their and operation) have reached their limits, through their ignorance of the specific features of local socio-economic and institutional conditions.
The needs of these services extend beyond simple funding ; management and organisational skills are required
The funding required to achieve the Millennium Development Goals for water is considerable, with an estimated $50 billion a year for 10 years.
The international community must ramp up its efforts, because international aid, both multilateral (the World Bank, European Water Facility), and bilateral (development agencies, decentralised and direct cooperation between countries) is currently incapable of deploying the Western standard of service worldwide. However, experts and stakeholders in the sector consider the needs for management skills (organisation and supervision) for these services even greater than those for financial resources.
These services require high-level managers, capable of :
- organising and managing large-scale services for hundreds of thousands of people in medium-sized cities, and millions of people in greater urban areas, all of which are expanding fast.
- adapting services to the local, often highly specific socio-economic situations, by implementing innovative techniques and methods on both technical and financial levels, requiring a high degree of coordination between research and field operations (experience feedback, assessment, dissemination of innovations)
- finally, demonstrating the level of management skill and authority required to lead the company’s human resources and work with administrative, political, and financial authorities and stakeholders in the difficult context of a fast-developing city
and must therefore attract, mobilise and develop first-class managers in their countries.
The programme : a tool for developing and emerging countries to guide future urban drinking water and sanitation service managers in their new positions
The OpT programme is designed to train managers of urban drinking water and sanitation services in emerging countries.
Cities of less than one million inhabitants are specifically targeted, as this is where most of the urban population growth will be concentrated in the decades to come.
The course focuses on the acquisition of skills and the proficient use of tools essential to these future service managers :
- Maintaining a global vision of the company and its environment
- Establishing a diagnostic :
- Assessing the technical, economic and financial sustainability of a service and the quality of its management
- Mastering the analysis framework and assessment methods, including those concerning the environmental and social situation of the service
- Understanding the stakeholders and the institutional and financial system in which the service functions
- Defining medium-term technical and financial objectives :
- Leading the prospective analysis of a department on a 5-, 10- and 15-year time frame
- Drafting the business plan and prioritising its actions.
- Heading an urban water and/or sanitation service :
- Managing supervisory, assessment, and quality improvement tools
- Laying out objectives, supervising, motivating, sanctioning
- Managing crises
- Communicating and managing relations with stakeholders (corporate human resources, public authorities, regulators, financial and institutional partners, citizen-consumers, NGOs, etc.)
