Water - Rural WSS

Rural WSS

Some 70 percent of the world’s poor live in rural areas, so a focus on rural water supply, sanitation, and hygiene is needed if the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are to be met. Much has been learned about how to make investments in rural water supply and sanitation effective and sustainable. First, decentralizing management to the lowest appropriate level, coupled with close community involvement in planning, financing, implementation, and operations provides a solid foundation for sustainable services. Second, implementing rural WSS within a broad development context allows institutions to respond to and support a range of community needs in a cost-effective and holistic manner. Third, integrating sanitation and hygiene measures into rural WSS projects ensures that health benefits from increasing water supply coverage are realized. Fourth, addressing post-construction sustainability ensures that institutions, funds, and expertise are available to keep rural water supply systems viable and functional.

Key Challenges
The challenge facing the sector today is how to scale up these experiences in order to meet the MDGs. Increased financing is clearly needed, but so is client capacity to implement and ensure the sustainability of investments. Progress can be made by moving to programmatic approaches, with donors harmonizing their use of support instruments and aligning them within government-designed development strategies. Such an approach can enable wide-scale sector reform, improve the predictability of financing, remove externally imposed bottlenecks, and optimize the impact of both government and external agency support.

World Bank Response

Traditionally the WSS sector has been analyzed from the urban or rural perspective, but more recently the World Bank has also put more emphasis on small town WSS. Since 1978, the World Bank has invested about US$ 5.5 billion in rural WSS, and annual investments have more than tripled.

Two-thirds of this growth has been through broad multisectoral investments in areas such as Social Funds and Rural Development projects. The Bank has taken a lead in coordinating programmatic approaches, and has begun providing national budget support to client countries through Poverty Reduction Support Credits in combination with decentralization support, capacity building, and technical assistance.