Water - Community Management

Community Management

Rural water supply and sanitation (WSS) investments flow through both dedicated rural WSS investments and multi-sector programs in which communities have chosen rural WSS among other development options.

Community Driven Development (CDD) treats poor people and their institutions as assets and partners in the development process and gives communities responsibility for managing investments.

Key Challenges
Poor and marginalized people are often viewed as passive targets of poverty reduction efforts but today many are expected to take responsibility for managing and maintaining rural water supply facilities.

Special care should be taken that gender equality issues are addressed in community management in WSS, since women are often the main users of water and since in some communities they are not expected to make their voices heard.

With community management being implemented by a broad base of stakeholders often working outside the WSS sector, keeping implementation up to date on key principles and national plans for scaling up service delivery is a key challenge.

World Bank Response
The World Bank conducted extensive operational research that led to a global consensus on the importance of the demand-responsive approach in rural WSS sustainable service delivery. This approach is shaped by the following key principles:

	Establishing processes and sufficient information flow for the community to make investment decisions
	Recognizing women as primary users of water and including them in sector development efforts
	Placing the community at the forefront of decision making and management through appropriate project rules, incentives, and social intermediation.
	Supporting local governments after facilities are built, to ensure the sustainability of investments

The Rural WSS toolkit for multisectoral projects (pdf) is built around the demand-responsive approach. Developed for the wide range of practitioners working on WSS programs, it lays out the key principles with methods and samples and is now being applied in countries across the world.