Trends Amongst Ngos in the Water and Sanitation Sector

TRENDS AMONGST NGOS IN THE WATER AND SANITATION SECTOR:

A competencies-driven geographic and intersectoral analysis

Presented to:

Second World Water Forum and Ministerial Conference

The Hague, The Netherlands

March 17, 2000

Co-authors:

Steve Waddell
Sr. Researcher and Consultant
Organizational Futures: The Collaboration Works

/ Piers Cross
Program Manager
World Bank

1. Introduction......

2. The Cases......

Case 1: Mvula Trust, BOTT and Peddie Regional Area, South Africa......

Case 2: WaterAid and Local NGOs in Urban Bangladesh......

Case 3: The Swajal Project and HGVS, India......

3. Case Analysis......

(a) Inter-Sectoral Partnering......

(b) Geographic Linkages......

(c) Emerging Coordinating/Contracting Structures......

4. Discussion......

(a) Emerging CSO roles by geographic level......

(b) Emerging challenges......

6. Conclusion......

1

1. Introduction

Over the past decade the drive to provide water and sanitation services (WSSs) for the world’s poor populations has generated new approaches that involve increasingly complex inter-organizational relationships. These new approaches are often responses to common failure of state-driven approaches that frequently over-taxed government resources and skills, did not engage consumers, and inefficiently used large capital investments to build facilities that people often did not want and could not afford. The ability of new institutional arrangements to address some of these difficulties is particularly important for one billion people without access to safe water and two billion without safe sanitation services, and an associated annual preventable child death rate of three million.

The new arrangements are based upon a much broader and systemic understanding of relationships between consumers and service providers (sometimes called a systems thinking approach). This approach focuses upon roles and core competencies of various players in the WSS system, and the different incentives that drive them. A systems approach considers these players’ position and potential relationships in the context of the basic large systems within which we work: environmental, social, economic and political systems. At the visionary level, a systems thinking approach aims to harness to the task of providing WSSs the resources and abilities of governmental organizations, business corporations, consumers and civil society organizations (CSOs), including non-governmental organizations (NGOs). These organizations are operational vehicles for integrating the large systems’ core competencies and developing sustainable access to WSSs.

At the strategic level, the systems thinking approach emphasizes demand-driven strategies for efficiencies and operational sustainability, the integration of water-sanitation-hygiene issues, and the importance of environmental sustainability of WSSs. These strategies are producing creative activity that accesses the core resources and competencies of business, government, and civil society. Within these new strategies, NGOs are playing new and bigger roles than they played traditionally in bringing water and sanitation to the world’s poor. That is at least in part a consequence of the growth in size and sophistication of civil society in many parts of the world that provide NGOs with new opportunities for influence and leverage.

This paper analyzes trends in NGOs role in WSSs in order to derive lessons and some ideas about how NGOs’ role can be enhanced. Building upon the concept that the organizational sectors of government, business, and CSOs have distinct core competencies, this paper looks at NGOs’ role in comparison to that of other sectors. Further, it analyzes distinctive competencies in WSS provision that arise from the geographic position of organizations—international, national, regional, and community. These sectoral and geographic distinctions provide the fundamental building blocks of the new approaches to WSS in Southern countries.

2. The Cases

In order to aid discussion about major institutional trends in water and sanitation, three cases are presented very briefly.

Case 1: Mvula Trust, BOTT and Peddie Regional Area, South Africa

The Peddie Regional Project was included in a Department of Water Affairs and Forestry (DWAF) BoTT initiative to bring water to the Peddie Regional Area’s approximate 4000 inhabitants. But by 1997 only technical designs and PSC setup were completed. Then the water project was included in a new approach that DWAF initiated, referred to as Build-Operate-Train-Transfer, or BoTT. This approach dramatically reduced the role of government to that of a contractor with a consortium of three businesses and a national NGO called Mvula Trust (the “Trust”).

Mvula was established in 1993 and manages a substantial WSS sector specific Trust fund supporting community-based initiative. The Trust implements a demand-responsive, community-owned service development approach. Today the Trust is a major national player in rural water in South Africa; it has supported projects that have resulted in over a million disadvantaged South Africans improving their services in a manner far more sustainable than in Government implemented rural projects.

The goal of allocating Peddie to the BoTT consortium was to speed delivery of water services, while providing not just technical and construction support, but also institutional social development (ISD). Two businesses, FST and Ninham-Shand, took responsibility for design; Group Five contracted for the construction aspects, and WSSA (a holding company for the French firm Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux) took the role of operations and maintenance.

With plans already completed years before, construction began immediately in 1997 and was finished in November 1998. This left the Trust little time to develop the communities’ roles and capacity to manage the final WSS, and raised challenges for the Trust’s preferred project development approach that places the community securely in charge of contracting and project implementation. Nevertheless, by March 1999 water in Peddie was being provided through 50 community standpipes that required villagers to pre-pay for water by purchasing a card. Ownership of the system will be transferred from DWAF to a the local government (namely the Amatola District Council)

Much still needs to be improved in the coordination and micro-policies of these BOTT projects, but the case demonstrates the potential of combined roles of central government facilitation, private sector implementation, NGO facilitation, community engagement and local government (or user association) long term ownership.

Case 2: WaterAid and Local NGOs in Urban Bangladesh

About a quarter of Dhaka’s population, or 2 million people, live in slums. Living on land they do not own, they are unable to apply to the government for water and sanitation services. They are left with unpalatable options: buying water from high-priced vendors, taking it illegally by tapping into the city system, or obtaining it from unsanitary ponds, rivers and other sources. Today about 25,000-30,000 slum-dwellers have legal water access through an innovation developed by a Dhaka NGO called DSK, and supported by the international British NGO WaterAid, the Water and Sanitation Program (WSP), and local government.

DSK built its reputation by providing health services. With a peri-natal mortality rate of about 20 percent, DSK easily made the linkage between health outcomes and water supply. When DSK approached WaterAid in 1996, it had already proven a new approach to the water problem: as a legal entity, the NGO would apply to the City to gain access to municipal water lines, pay for the water, and develop the water services with neighborhood groups. For the City, this helped solve the problem of non-payers accessing water by turning them into payers.

WaterAid helped DSK—and now six other local NGO partners—by paying for the social development costs (about 50 percent of a project’s costs) with funds raised from various sources, including the British Government, British water corporations, and the general British public.[1] Moreover, WaterAid helped build DSK’s organizational and technical capacity to develop local water points. In turn, DSK took leadership in building neighbourhood groups’ own capacity for managing the water points that include a hand pump, underground collector, and a caretaker/fee gatherer. Today with support of the WSP the project has snowballed to over 40 additional installations in Dhaka. The projects are still maturing and final managing structures remain to be determined among three options: one run directly by a users association, one with community tendering to a business to run the installations, and one where the NGO acts as a mini-water corporation for the poor. Discussion about the options is carried on in part through a network of NGOs that WaterAid is helping to establish that have worked on the water projects.

Case 3: The Swajal Project and HGVS, India

Over 1000 villages in Uttar Pradesh (UP), one of the poorest states of India on the country’s northern border, are obtaining improved water and sanitation services through a six-year, $71 million World Bank project ending in 2002. An official World Bank-UP Government agreement established an independent society, essentially a new government-oriented NGO (a GONGO), as the Project Management Unit (PMU). The PMU is staffed by a director and 10 people seconded from the Government, business, and NGOs and reports to the government. PMU has contracted 60 local NGOs including the Himalayan Gram Vikas Samiti (HGVS) in tripartite agreements with local Village Water and Sanitation Committees (VWSCs).

The Swajal project by-passes the central government agencies and relies solidly on NGO agencies. It is the largest project in rural India with respect to achieving potentially sustainable service delivery. HGVS provides both community development and technical support to the local communities as well as providing critical connections between local villages. The PMU manages the entire project and builds the NGOs’ capacity to provide this range of services. Although founded only in 1990, when the project engaged HGVS a half dozen years later the NGO already had an impressive record and community network through its adult literacy work. In 1998 after two years of work, the PMU-HGVS partnership had brought water to three villages with partner VWSCs. Today HGVS has 53 staff, including 10 engineers, all working on the World Bank project; it has moved from just direct implementation of projects to building the capacity of other NGOs to being project implementers with VWSCs.

3. Case Analysis

These cases are not presented as a representative sample of NGO engagement in the WSS sector, but merely as some leading examples. The cases all have two key structural qualities: complex inter-organizational arrangements that involve (a) inter-sectoral partnering and (b) inter-CSO partnering. We present this as a trend, distinctly different from the previous dominant ones characterized by “government do all” approach, or by a simple contractual arrangement with one party responsible for financing (such as government) and another for project development (such as a business or CSO). This “partnering” approach has been evident for some years now. However, it is only now that we are starting to better determine the types of relationship structures that a partnering strategy can produce and NGOs’ role within them.

(a) Inter-Sectoral Partnering

All of the cases involve government and NGOs, and the WaterAid and South Africa cases also have an important role for business. Why does it make sense to engage these different types of organizations? Perhaps this question can be best answered by thinking more analytically about the distinctions between business, government, and civil society organizations. One approach that is helpful is a competencies-based model. In this model, the basic question is “Of all the competencies needed for building a sustainable WSS, in which sectoral organizations are they found?” Competencies grow out of distinct organizational attributes, resources, and the ability to organize them effectively. An organization can do something competently because it has access to some specific powers or assets, and it has a team of people and an organization that can successfully combine them to produce a result.

The three sectors of business, government, and civil society have generically distinct resources based upon different logics, goals, and ethos. Table 1 summarizes some of these generic distinct attributes. In this table, the basic goal of civil society might be described as “expression of values;” in the case of NGOs involved in WSS production, this has to do with the right to water and basic sanitation services and a value around response to basic human needs. Business will become involved in WSS production as a primary activity insofar as it can make money from it. And government becomes involved to strengthen its support and ensure public order by providing what people perceive as a government responsibility.

Table 1 also proposes that in determining whether an outcome is “good,” civil society’s basic question is whether the outcome has enhanced justice; business asks whether it has made money; and government asks whether the activity was legal. For example, in Dhaka a solution had been stymied in part by the illegality of the land tenure. Table 1 also points out that the different organizations tend to have different formal organizational forms—but whether an organization is non-profit is really only one indicator of whether it is truly a civil society organization.

Table 1

Some Distinct Generic Sectoral Attributes

Government / Business / Civil Society Organizations
Primary interest / Political / Economic / Social
Primary goals / Societal order / Wealth creation / Expression of values
Assessment frame / Legality / Profitability / Justice
Dominant organizational form / Governmental / For profit / Non profit
Relationship basis / Rules / Transactions / Values
Time horizon / Electoral cycle / Business cycle/annual report / (Re)generational—human and natural environment

The different rationale of the sectors for building relationships often poses difficulty in building inter-sectoral networks. Government forms relationships around rules, and NGOs are often frustrated by government stickiness around rules. The Dhaka case presents a great example of DSK creatively managing rules around who can applicant for water services. The transaction orientation of business based upon whether there is money to be made in a relationship allows for quick action, but often makes people feel exploited. Civil society’s values-base for relationships allows NGOs to gain buy-in from diverse communities and generate volunteer commitment, but also makes for relatively slow action. The different business and CSO relationship rationales resulted in tension in the South African case: the engineering designs were already completed and business simply pushed ahead with its part of the project as quickly as it could to get paid as quickly as possible, without considering the pacing of the Trust’s institutional and social development work that was impossible to fast-track.

These distinct attributes are associated with distinct core resources identified in Table 2. Traditionally government responsibility was associated with directly creating the WSS projects. The big conceptual switch has been to redefine government’s role as one to create the systems and operating environment that will get the WSS projects produced. This conceptual switch has arisen from understanding that in fact government’s core resources have nothing to do with constructing the WSSs, but rather with organizing the resources to get the job done—by taxation, policy development, and coordination between many related issues such as environmental and health policy.

Therefore, in all the cases we presented the government is not “doing the doing,” but rather it is making the work possible. In the South African case, the government has done this through the BoTT contract; in Dhaka it has created a way to basically transfer the power to deliver water to NGOs; and in UP the government has delegated its traditional role to the PMU. At the international level through the World Bank Northern governments use tax resources to fund the projects in Northern India and Dhaka; also, Northern taxation policy has encouraged donations to WaterAid for funding.

The role of civil society dominates “the doing” in India and Dhaka. CSOs have particular knowledge about the communities and what they are capable of, and expertise in organizing them so they can develop their capabilities. But it is particularly in the people-to-people side that CSOs’ core resources come out; in the South African case, for example, this has been distinguished from the actual construction and engineering side of projects that is allocated to the business sector. In the WaterAid case business has quite a different role. In those examples, the major asset of business is its financial strength, its marketing, and its networks—all of which it uses to raise more than $3.2 million or over 20 percent annually of WaterAid’s budget. There are 30 water-related companies in the United Kingdom that donate money and use their business and employee networks to raise more money for WaterAid. An additional role is provision through retirees of the water industry who provide technical support for the development of the water projects. The lack of business sector involvement in the other cases in construction might either reflect an opportunity for further improvement, or simply a different setting where different options are available. It will be interesting to see if in the longer term the HGVS model of combining both social development and construction skills will prove durable. If community participation in construction and education about maintenance is a high priority, it is possible that a CSO culture might produce the best outcomes.