Memorandum submitted by the Institution
of Civil Engineers (ICE)
WATER AND
SANITATION
Executive Summary
The following are a list of ICE recommendations
that DFID might wish to consider adopting in order to aid its
capacity to fulfil its commitments to meeting the UN's the Millennium
Development Goals (MDG). These summary recommendations are substantiated
by the evidence contained in this document.
Water service delivery—ICE recommends
that DFID should:
— (i) Ensure improvements to water
and sanitation are delivered in a sustainable way, (ii)
create an enabling environment and (iii) support the provision
of direct business development.
— Identify a set of primary objectives
and concentrate methodologies on delivering them.
— Ensure all projects have the
support, and engagement, of end users.
— Afford prime consideration and
support to schemes which can demonstrate a high probability of
success and sustainability.
— Engage in projects which yield
the maximum benefit per pound spent.
— Be proactive in enhancing accountability
and water governance, but avoid detailed interference. It should
also ensure the long-term sustainability of its sponsored projects.
Sanitation—ICE recommends that DFID should:
— Include conveyance to its list
of three core aspects of sanitation.
— Emphasise the need for the priority
of sanitation to be raised at every opportunity.
Financing and aid instruments for water and
sanitation—ICE recommends that DFID should:
— Control the flow of funds to
specific schemes to ensure the desired outputs.
— Determine how best to access
EU funds.
Water Resource Management—ICE recommends
that DFID should:
— Stop funding national budgets
in favour of controlling the destiny of funds to successfully
support integrated water resource management.
— Promote a hydrology databank.
Improving health and education through water
and sanitation interventions—ICE recommends that DFID should:
— Introduce water and sanitation
into education programmes.
Gender aspects of water and sanitation issues—ICE
recommends that DFID should:
— Ensure appropriate sanitation
facilities in schools are given high priority to help halt the
number of girls from stopping schooling when they reach puberty.
Implications of climate change for water and
sanitation—ICE recommends that DFID should:
— Build flexibility into infrastructure
to allow it to be modified or supplemented in the future when
the impact of climate change becomes clearer.
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 The Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE)
is a UK-based international organisation with over 75,000 members
ranging from professional civil engineers to students. It is an
educational and qualifying body and has charitable status under
UK law. Founded in 1818, the ICE has become recognised worldwide
for its excellence as a centre of learning, as a qualifying body
and as a public voice for the profession.The following is the
evidence of the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) prepared
by its Water Board and Appropriate Development Panel.
2. WATER SERVICE
DELIVERY
2.1 The government, in line with other international
agencies, has moved the agenda from the promotion of specific
projects to a policy of seeking to reduce poverty. This has resulted
in providing funds to governments and allowing them to decide
the priority of competing projects. While this has been in accord
with international development targets the result is that water
and sanitation have become a sub-set of the broader agenda.
2.2 It is difficult to find hard, documentary
"evidence" of the effectiveness of past spend on such
work on supporting progress towards the MDGs. One key problem
is that with the increasing use by DFID, and other donors, of
untied aid, firm records of exactly what money has been spent
on, and what has been achieved are difficult to come by; those
records that are kept, are held by recipient governments, and
not generally available to the UK taxpayer or to Parliament.
2.3 Water and sanitation have suffered particularly
from a continued set of policies which seem to fit badly with
grassroots priorities and willingness to pay. This partly arises
from the common linking in global/donor thinking of water and
sanitation to health alone and not to productive use which could
both increase the perceived value of water and provide the means
to pay for it. This would in turn give people the resources to
improve health and nutrition in a much broader and more effective
fashion, and make the economic benefits of such small enterprise
greater and more directly identifiable.
2.4 Donors and governments must ensure that
where improvements to water and sanitation are identified as necessary
then those objectives are delivered in a sustainable way. They
must balance the need to create an enabling environment and support
the provision of direct business development support, since there
is little benefit in having an enabling environment when the domestic
enterprises lack the capacity to realise the opportunities.
2.5 Governments and donors must identify
the primary objectives and concentrate methodologies on delivering
those. We believe that burdening projects with multiple objectives
will frequently result in none of the objectives being properly
achieved. This does not imply that hurdles, such as the lack of
technical skills, can be ignored. There must be proper training
and administrative institutions, but these are a means to the
desired end not an end in themselves.
2.6 There is also a danger that to change
attitudes to what is sustainable from the big steps defined by
donors, to steps appropriate to end-user capacity, will take time
to achieve. A frantic push to reach MDGs will increase the risk
of hastily and ill conceived projects being implemented that lack
the support or engagement of end users. That said, these dangers
appear to be accepted by DFID and it is encouraging to see DFID
supported infrastructure funds such as CLIFF (Community-led Infrastructure
Finance Facility)[192]
and PPIAF (Public-Private Infrastructure Advisory Facility)[193]
which are assisting community leadership in project design, funding
municipal and national level capacity building in the design and
procurement of effective projects as well as a range of public-private
or public-community/local private sector partnership arrangements
driven locally.
2.7 In the case of water, achieving a minimum
standard of universal access to 15 litres/person/day is affordable,
achievable and sustainable. Achieving this benchmark and maintaining
it for all should take priority over moving to the next level,
such as private connections to households.
2.8 The question of securing the right balance
between the various aspects of service provision perhaps needs
to be redefined. Despite recent increases in budget, it will be
many years before the universal provision of water services can
be achieved. We believe that prime consideration and support should
be afforded to schemes which can demonstrate a high probability
of success and sustainability.
2.9 A secondary objective is to engage in
projects which yield the maximum benefit per pound spent. While
this may result in segments, such as rural villages being overlooked,
solutions for rural populations may be simpler to implement than
addressing the urban areas, therefore helping to address the balance.
Although it might be possible to develop a form of weighting system,
we believe that a pragmatically simpler approach would be to allocate
a fixed percentage of the budget for maximised benefit schemes,
with the remainder being applied to those areas that do not qualify
under these criteria.
2.10 Private/public partnerships (operating
at the right level and in the interests of the local community)
can greatly increase the levels of available water and sanitation.
We believe that to deliver consistent results the culture within
the recipient country must be fully understood, and used to define
the delivery mechanism most likely to lead to long-term success
in that location. There is little purpose in proceeding with a
scheme on a public involvement basis if the public institutions
lack the capacity to deliver. Equally it is futile to insist on
private involvement if the eventual outcome is that the private
contractor will be dismissed, as the scheme then fails and money
is wasted. Local community engagement is essential.
2.11 DFID's role in enhancing accountability
and overall water governance should be proactive, but avoid detailed
interference. DFID must ensure the long-term sustainability of
the projects that it sponsors, which should include requiring
evidence that they are still functioning as intended, before sanctioning
further expenditure in that particular country. In many cases
this will require considerable emphasis on the provision and delivery
of operation and maintenance budgets, enabled by appropriate charging
mechanisms; together with the creation of appropriate institutions
that can deliver the necessary skills and the disciplines to apply
them. It is also essential that wastage is reduced, such as curtailing
inefficient irrigation practices. This is best achieved through
a charging policy and an insistence that water is an economic
good.
2.12 Capacity building, co-operation, co-ordination
and community involvement are essential if development is to be
sustainable and not imposed inappropriately by external bodies.
Related to this are transaction costs and livelihoods. Problems
for the poor are often not to do with supply per se but with the
costs and services. This is an important debate on the benefits
of privatisation of utilities and services. It also raises the
issue of whether there is a case for a rights-based approach to
local governance—especially important in those communities,
which are excluded by virtue of illegal/disputed property rights.
Successful water and sanitation projects will hopefully deliver
clear benefits that are seen to assist in boosting local economies
as well as delivering significant improvements in public health.
Thus encouraging governments to seek to maximise the benefits
that might be obtained by replicating the projects elsewhere.
However, with the relatively short life of most governments this
may be expecting too much. Therefore capacity building should
cover all engineers who work in developing and transitional countries
and not simply government engineers, who will remain when construction
has finished.
2.13 The installation of highly mechanised
processes which are known to be prone to breakdown, such as Sequencing
Batch Reactors, in a country which lacks even a basic understanding
of preventative maintenance would be a mistake. Membrane treatment
plants are simple and reduce the knowledge of chemistry required
for water treatment plant operations. However, they have complex
cleaning requirements and the expensive membranes require replacement
after five years. They should only be deployed if the requirements
of the cleaning/operating regime, and the financing of membrane
replacement, can be addressed convincingly. We maintain that DFID
needs to have access to technical skills to allow such matters
to be addressed.
2.14 Scaling up a technical solution that
works on a small community scale does not mean that it will do
so on a large one, something John Smeaton observed 250 years ago.
We believe that it would be more valid to address whether or not
successful solutions can be replicated elsewhere if circumstances
are similar. This would also apply to institutions established
to manage the provision of water and sewerage.
3. SANITATION
3.1 The inclusion of "Water" in
the MDGs as only a subset of one of the later goals is regrettable.
Sewage and sanitation were initially omitted and only included
as priorities retrospectively two years later. We recognise that
there are political realities that have to be addressed, but it
is worrying that something as important as the MDGs can relegate
water to such a minor position. The provision of quality water
and adequate sanitation was the greatest public health advance
of the last 150 years and was advanced by Bazalgette's London
sewer system in the 1800s. It allowed populations to flourish
and undoubtedly underpinned the economic development of the western
world. There is no reason why it should not at least provide a
platform for economic development in many third world countries,
particularly those that could benefit from a large tourist trade.
Water and sanitation should have a far higher prominence than
it currently enjoys.
3.2 The importance of the three core aspects—Hygiene
Promotion, Household Sanitary Arrangements and Sewage Treatment—are
rightly highlighted by DFID. However it might be beneficial if
a fourth aspect to sanitation "conveyance" (the systematic
and intentional flow or transfer of water from one point to another)
were to be recognised instead of being contained within Sewage
Treatment. Municipalities that have sought to avoid the high capital
costs of sewerage, and opted for pail closet systems, have been
forced to recognise the inadequacy of their decision, and reinvest
in waterborne sewerage systems.
3.3 While systems like "Twin Pit Latrines"
are undoubtedly satisfactory in rural areas, and remove the need
for systems of conveyance, they are unlikely to prove sustainable
in urban areas, and after 140 years of experience it is hard to
see any alternative to waterborne systems. In many major cities,
inadequate sewerage results in flooding of raw sewerage into streets
with even moderate rainfall, presenting health hazards to the
poor. Changing the third core aspect to "Sewerage and Sewage
Treatment" would be a move forward.
3.4 There is ample historical evidence to
demonstrate that provision of potable water alone will not deliver
large improvements in public health. More recently the decision
of charities such as Water Aid and Water for People to focus on
sanitation as well as drinking water reflects their own experience
of low improvement rates when sanitation is ignored. Nonetheless,
the popular misconception that potable water alone is important
is widespread, as evidenced by the campaign of one branch of the
North American Catholic Church to raise funds for the provision
of potable water for villages in China. DFID should continue to
emphasise the need for the priority of sanitation to be raised
at every opportunity, but should emphasise four core aspects—not
three.
3.5 In both water and sanitation provision
DFID should not be too concerned about "best practice".
With cultural differences so severe between countries, best practice
will necessarily vary from place to place. We believe that a more
achievable goal would be to define what bad practice is, and refuse
to sanction such proposals. For example, installing pail closets
may be technically acceptable in some rural communities, but there
are better solutions and they are not suited to large conurbations.
Further they frequently result in social stigmatisation of those
responsible for collection and emptying of the pails. In all but
the most exceptional circumstances they should not be viewed as
a solution.
4. FINANCING
AND AID
INSTRUMENTS FOR
WATER AND
SANITATION
4.1 The provision of aid through budgetary
support not only facilitates dilution of the amount applied to
the desired objective through corruption, it also reduces the
ability of DFID and other agencies to influence the achievement
of their broader objectives. We believe that would it be wrong
to return to a system of imposing schemes on recipient countries,
but where a country requests support for a specific scheme, then
DFID should control the flow of funds to ensure that they are
applied to delivering the defined outputs. Such a discipline would
allow donors to decide which projects would deliver the desired
improvements to the poor.
4.2 DFID is increasingly disbursing its
growing budget by "outsourcing" large sums to other
agencies, which are given responsibility for managing the expenditure.
Within the water field, DFID has allocated substantial funds to:
— The Global Water Partnership[194]
to help implement the concepts of Integrated Water Resources Management.
However, at the recent World Water Summit in Mexico, the World
Bank and others criticised the GWP efforts as being ineffective
to date.
— The CGIAR[195]
Challenge Programme: there have been critics[196]
of the Challenge Programme, which has to date delivered little.
— DFID has awarded some £24 million
over the next five years to the Canadian led Climate Change Adaptation
in Africa Research and Capacity Development Programme[197]
(CCAA). This project is being led by the Canadian Government's
International Development Research Centre[198]
(IDRC). Following examination of both the IDRC and DFID websites
the destination of funding is not clear, nor the details of what
has been achieved. Groups such as the UK Hadley Centre and Centre
for Ecology and Hydrology, who have worked extensively on the
effects of climate change on African water resources, have had
no opportunity to bid into these substantial funds, and to contribute
to delivery of the project.
4.3 ICE believes that DFID should determine
how best to access EU funds. The effectiveness of the deployment
of available funding must be determined by an assessment of whether
or not the funds properly secure the desired primary objectives
in a sustainable manner, and if so what is the cost benefit ratio
in terms of people served per pound spent. If the MDGs are the
goal, then maximising the number of beneficiaries per pound spent
must follow logically. If however there is a need also to be seen
to be equitable in terms of distribution of aid between regions
of the world, the maximisation will simply be within the defined
allocation for any region.
4.4 While it could be argued that aid should
be unfettered by such private sector considerations, and perhaps
that is correct in terms of not tying management of any facility
down to the use of private operators from outside. However, when
it comes to design of installations and purchase of equipment,
the situation is far less clear. Not only do many countries lack
the manufacture of products required to provide water and sanitation,
policies such as the old "Buy India" policy lead to
the mis-specification of equipment which undermined the functioning
of projects, simply because an Indian company could claim that
it produced a generic product rather than one designed for the
purpose. For example, utilising a fire pump to pump sewage is
guaranteed to fail. It is essential that where appropriate skills
or equipment are not available locally that they are imported
(together with adequate arrangements for spare parts), and at
that point UK firms should at least be given the opportunity to
bid on a level playing field with other potential importers. Therefore
it is essential that DFID has access to the technical skills to
assess such situations and arbitrate in cases of disagreement.
5. DFID'S ORGANISATIONAL
CAPACITY FOR
SUPPORT TO
WATER AND
SANITATION
5.1 A National Audit Office audit[199]
of DFID in 2003 revealed that:
(i) DFID did not have sufficient staff with
real water expertise capable of delivering on their programme;
and
(ii) the panel did not believe that direct
aid with no strings attached could, or would work.
We believe that the NAO criticism of the lack
of in-house technical expertise is very accurate. DFID is trying
to manage an expanding aid budget whilst reducing its complement
of technical staff. There are also often poor links between UK
central policy making and budgetary disbursement in the regions.
6. WATER RESOURCE
MANAGEMENT
6.1 DFID's ability to support integrated
water resource management is incumbent on it moving away from
the concept of funding national budgets rather than controlling
the destiny of the funds provided. While supplementing national
budgets might have been designed to build capability, it could,
however, support existing corruption. Controlling the application
of funds will be far more effective in delivering the benefits
anticipated and in its own way build capability by demonstrating
what can be achieved through properly integrated projects.
6.2 Where DFID effectively delegates management
responsibility for large sums of money to outside agencies, the
lack of firm data, or "evidence" of the effectiveness
of such expenditure is perhaps hardly surprising. Some water resource
issues include:
— Without reliable hydrometric
data, water supply schemes will often be badly designed: they
may be over-designed, without adequate water to meet the design
specification, or may be under-designed and not fully able to
harness the potential resource.
— An alternative approach has
been adopted by the World Bank in India, where the Hydrology Project[200]
has forced government agencies in India to take hydrology seriously,
and where relatively "low-tech", traditional methods
of data collection have been employed. The initial first five-year
phase of the project involved upgrading equipment at over one
thousand stations, and more than 25,000 staff, at levels ranging
up from field technicians through data processing staff at regional
offices to managers at State and national level have been trained
to date. The project invested hugely in development of a well-trained
pool of staff, and even attempted to overcome the problem of low
government salaries. DFID would probably not support such an approach
in the future, as it is a "top-down" project, effectively
"imposed" upon the Government of India by the World
Bank. This does not conform to DFID's agenda, yet the project
has been extremely effective. A Hydrology Information Bank2 has
also been identified as being urgently needed in Sudan.[201]
— Staff training is either neglected
or when staff are trained in new techniques, particularly modern
computer-based data processing, they often subsequently leave
poorly paid government service for the private sector.
— There is a danger of planning
how to develop and manage water resources without the capability
of reliably quantifying the resource.
6.3 Better irrigation and water storage
is in the same category. Current practices are adopted because
they are: traditional, generally simple, have a low capital cost,
have low running costs if water is free. If improvements are to
be addressed, monies will have to be provided to cover the cost
(at least in part) of the capital equipment—micro irrigation
rather than open channels—and the water consumed then needs
to be charged for at an economic rate. Charging alone will not
work because farmers will not be able to pay for the huge wastage
from current systems.
6.4 We recognise that dam building is emotive,
with much opposition from the lobby that all dam building is wrong.
The displacement of the poor is only one of many arguments deployed.
It is worth remembering that relocation of communities is not
a new problem. There is no simple answer, displacement of people
is always distressing and the question is "How should they
be compensated?" The quality of relocation and rights to
it are fundamentally important. The West's traditional answer
is to provide financial compensation, but this is probably ill
advised in the third world. There is, however, a model from Victorian
and Edwardian times that might be useful. There are several examples
where whole communities were re-housed as part of the project
and given work managing the dam, the aqueducts and the surrounding
agricultural land to prevent pollution. We do emphasise that the
land was owned by the municipality that built the dam, so the
model was housing and employment not land ownership.
6.5 We recognise that it is probably idealistic
to believe that any private company is going to opt to deliver
purification of industrial water to the standards required in
its own country when competitors are adopting the standards of
the country in which it is operating. We believe the answer is
to have standards for sewage and industrial waste treatment and
the enforcement procedures to ensure they are met. Since not even
the EU has achieved this yet it is likely to take a long time.
7. URBANISATION
AND WATER
7.1 It is unlikely that anything can be
done to stop people leaving a rural existence in the belief (no
matter how incorrect), that they will have a better life in urban
communities.
7.2 Since the growth of urban populations
is inevitable, provision of water supply and sanitation must take
account of this. It does not mean that infrastructure should be
provided now for demands that are anticipated in 25 years time,
as that would be wasteful, however when infrastructure is provided
it should be part of a phased implementation that can be expanded
in a logical manner to meet future demands when they arise.
8. IMPROVING
HEALTH AND
EDUCATION THROUGH
WATER AND
SANITATION INTERVENTIONS
8.1 Education is vital if the benefits of
water supply and sanitation are to be realised in full. Lack of
personal hygiene, will inevitably undermine the benefits achieved.[202]
8.2 Education alone is not enough as cultural
issues need to be addressed. Water for People report that only
60% of rural communities in Bangladesh are prepared to install
treatment plants to reduce arsenic levels in water. The 40% who
decline are Fatalists who believe that personal health is decreed
by the gods, and has nothing to do with contamination of food
or drinking water. DFID must be aware of the types of problems
which go beyond simple education and challenge fundamental beliefs.
8.3 Wherever possible introduction of water
and sanitation should be accompanied by a co-ordinated education
programme that seeks to maximise the potential benefits to be
achieved.
9. GENDER ASPECTS
OF WATER
AND SANITATION
ISSUES
9.1 There is a real risk of trying to achieve
too much through the introduction of water and sanitation, and
attempting to tie provision to gender equality may in many cases
be a step too far. Gender inequality is a cultural and in some
cases a religious matter. It cannot be right to deny access to
safe water on the grounds that gender inequality will continue.
9.2 Provision must recognise cultural issues
such as segregation, and also seek to avoid introduction of concepts
that will exacerbate social divides, but it is difficult to see
any generalisation that can be deployed successfully. Water for
People insist that where women have been released from water carrying,
the time that is then available should be used to gainfully provide
finance for the upkeep of the new facility, but such an approach
is condemned by many commentators.
9.3 The Water Engineering Development Centre[203]
(WEDC) has reported that lack of sanitation and privacy is the
most commonly quoted reason for girls stopping their education
when they reach puberty. Clearly the provision of appropriate
sanitary arrangements in schools must be a priority, but it is
possible that the real reasons are socio-economic. Even if the
facilities at schools are upgraded, girls will still leave at
puberty, and other explanations will be put forward. Nonetheless
provision of appropriate toilet facilities at schools should command
high priority as it will help to address this issue and provide
a practical example for practice of personal hygiene.
10. IMPLICATIONS
OF CLIMATE
CHANGE FOR
WATER AND
SANITATION
10.1 Numerous models are available which
predict the different consequences of climate change. At present
it is impossible to say which one will prove correct. Against
this background it is impossible to design for climate change,
but what DFID can and should do is build flexibility into infrastructure
to allow it to be modified or supplemented in the future when
the impact of climate change becomes clearer. Climate change should
neither be a reason for squandering existing resources on potential
failures, nor as a cause for inaction.
10.2 The prospect of conflict over water
is certainly a possibility, but the areas of dispute are frequently
politically as well as hydrologically based. Both Bangladesh and
Pakistan blame India for the potential water shortages that they
face. Egypt threatens countries of the upper Nile with war if
they seek to dam the Nile, but continues with wasteful irrigation
practices for its own farmers.
10.3 While water shortages may be used as
an excuse for war, they are unlikely to be the real reason for
wars, even with the advent of climate change. The water shortages
will not appear overnight and dams are not constructed in a matter
of days or weeks. DFID should apply effort to seeking diplomatic
solutions to these problems if the parties are willing. If these
issues can be settled in the next 10-15 years, then infrastructure
can be developed to accommodate the political settlements in most
cases. There will be some exceptions, but many of the so-called
flash points are capable of rational solution.
October 2006
192 http://www.homeless-international.org/standard-1.aspx?id=0:27820&id=0:27813 Back
193
http://www.ppiaf.org/ Back
194
http://www.gwpforum.org/ Back
195
http://www.cgiar.org/ Back
196
http://www.gmwatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=295 Back
197
http://www.idrc.ca/en/ev-94424-201-1-DO-TOPIC.html Back
198
http://www.idrc.ca/en/ev-1-201-1-DO-TOPIC.html Back
199
http://www.nao.org.uk/publications/nao-reports/02-03/0203351.pdf Back
200
http://web.worldbank.org/external/projects/main?pagePK=64283627&piPK=73230&theSitePK=40941&menuPK=228424&Projectid=P010485 Back
201
UNESCO funded conference "The Effective Use of Technology
for Poverty Eradication" Cairo, Egypt Sept 2006. Back
202
http://www.globalhandwashing.org/ Back
203
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/well/resources/Publications/Country%20Notes/CN2.4%20Kenya.htm Back
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