   
Rural water supply and sanitation (WSS) investments flow through both dedicated rural WSS investments and multisector 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. Special care should be taken that gender equality issues (126k pdf) are addressed in community management in WSS. Poor and marginalized people are often viewed as the target of poverty reduction efforts. 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. 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 included the following key principals: 
| Establishing processes and sufficient information flow for the community to make investment decisions | | Recognizing women as primary users of water and their including them in sector development | | Placing the community at the forefront of decisionmaking and management through appropriate project rules, incentives, and social intermediation | | Supporting local governments after facilities construction to ensure sustainability of interments |
The Rural WSS toolkit for multisector projects is built around the demand responsive approach was 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 implemented globally. |
RSS