Unleash Your Potential - Namagunga Girls Coding Club
Advancing sustainability of WASH services within USAID
1. Advancing Sustainability of WASH
Services within USAID
Heather Skilling, USAID
Monitoring WASH Service Delivery
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
April 9-11, 2013
2. What did we learn by using
Sustainability Check?
Three levels of learning
1. Lessons about the sustainability of
specific interventions
2. Lessons about using the tool to
measure sustainability
3. Lessons about how to program for
sustainability
3. Indicative findings
The Interventions
•Ghana – challenges in financial sustainability and district level operational
capacity
•Philippines – rural interventions undermined by financial weakness and poor
post-construction support (linked to institutional mandates)
•Dominican Republic – issues related to poor life-cycle costing and weak
decentralisation of INAPA/capacity of local government
The Tool
•Context and sequencing
•Qualitative data and scoring are challenging
•Streamlining – of design and tool
•Cost-benefit of applying tool at small scale
4. What does this tell us?
FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT INSTITUTIONAL TECHNICAL
Greatest
challenge
Decentralized
Policy matters
capacity for LT
support
Hardware not the
primary issue
Validating intuitive knowledge….
5. USAID Programming
for sustainability
USAID Forward: Transformation in Approach
•USAID set out to employ the central pillars of aid effectiveness—
country ownership, systems strengthening and sustainability—derived
from global meetings in Paris, Accra and Busan.
•As a cornerstone of our reform agenda, we have begun a critical shift
in the way we administer our assistance, placing a greater emphasis on
public-private partnerships, channeling funding to local governments
and organizations that have the in-country knowledge and expertise to
create sustainable change, and expanding our partner base.
6. WASH
Programming for
sustainability
USAID Water and Development Strategy:
Will seek investments in longer-term monitoring
and evaluation of its water activities in order to
assess sustainability and impact of project funds
beyond the typical life-of-project and to enable
reasonable support to issues that arise
subsequent to completion of projects.
8. How, specifically?
• Refinement and publication of stand-alone, detailed Sustainability
Check “tool” methodology for wide public dissemination
• Incorporation of methodology as part of USAID Water Strategy
guidance to the field
• Additional application of tool to selected USAID WASH programs
• Continued dialogue and action with other WASH partners - SWA
• Focus on capacity building, local ownership, sanitation and hygiene,
decentralization of resources
10. THANK YOU
_______
USAID: rrainey@usaid.gov and hskilling@usaid.gov
Aguaconsult: h.lockwood@aguaconsult.co.uk
Rotary International / The Rotary Foundation: james.robinson@rotary.org
For further information see:
http://www.aguaconsult.co.uk/articles/0/28/International-H2O-
Alliance/d,news-details/
Editor's Notes
- to define the questions, establish scoring and to interpret the answers. Sequencing matters – critical first step is to survey at higher levels to enable further contextualisation of lower level surveys Mobile phone data collection technology - time saving, but requires technical capacity and on ground support to work well Triangulation is important for understanding differing perspectives on sustainability risk, but increases the amount of work Beta design could be stream-lined. Fewer indicators + new factor area for environment Tool itself needs to be ‘streamlined’ – one integrated and linked product, but this requires programming inputs Excluding the cost of designing the tool, the assessment costs are ~ $50,000 - $60,000 per sample country Order of magnitude country cost - sampling of 5 interventions in Ghana and 4 in the Dominican Republic Total number of beneficiaries of about 100,000 in each country and sample confidence level of 7%
Three years ago, President Obama and Secretary Clinton called for the elevation of development as a key part of America’s national security and foreign policy. Through both the firstever Presidential Policy Directive on Global Development and the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, they set forth a vision of an empowered and robust Agency To meet these expectations and approach our mission with renewed capacity, we undertook an ambitious reform agenda called USAID Forward. The reforms are focused on three main areas: Deliver results on a meaningful scale through a strengthened USAID. In order to maximize our impact with every development dollar, we have to pursue a more strategic, focused and results-oriented approach. From strengthening our policy and budget management to enacting a world-class evaluation policy, USAID Forward is helping us to do that. Promote sustainable development through high-impact partnerships. In order to achieve long-term sustainable development, we have to support he institutions, private sector partners and civil society organizations that serve as engines of growth and progress for their own nations. USAID Forward is helping us to do that through new models for public-private partnerships and increased investment directly to partner governments and local organizations. Identify and scale up innovative, breakthrough solutions to intractable development challenges. At USAID, we have a strong history of partnerships with the scientific community that helped pioneer some of the greatest successes in development to date. USAID Forward is helping us to further this legacy by strengthening our work with scientists, researchers and universities, investing in new technologies to source and scale game-changing solutions, and supporting mobile solutions to dramatically expand opportunity. .
Three years ago, President Obama and Secretary Clinton called for the elevation of development as a key part of America’s national security and foreign policy. Through both the firstever Presidential Policy Directive on Global Development and the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, they set forth a vision of an empowered and robust Agency To meet these expectations and approach our mission with renewed capacity, we undertook an ambitious reform agenda called USAID Forward. The reforms are focused on three main areas: Deliver results on a meaningful scale through a strengthened USAID. In order to maximize our impact with every development dollar, we have to pursue a more strategic, focused and results-oriented approach. From strengthening our policy and budget management to enacting a world-class evaluation policy, USAID Forward is helping us to do that. Promote sustainable development through high-impact partnerships. In order to achieve long-term sustainable development, we have to support he institutions, private sector partners and civil society organizations that serve as engines of growth and progress for their own nations. USAID Forward is helping us to do that through new models for public-private partnerships and increased investment directly to partner governments and local organizations. Identify and scale up innovative, breakthrough solutions to intractable development challenges. At USAID, we have a strong history of partnerships with the scientific community that helped pioneer some of the greatest successes in development to date. USAID Forward is helping us to further this legacy by strengthening our work with scientists, researchers and universities, investing in new technologies to source and scale game-changing solutions, and supporting mobile solutions to dramatically expand opportunity. .
