Southern Madagascar Water Assessment: Management Opportunities Report
Summary
This Management Opportunities report, developed by USAID REAL-Water, results from the Southern Madagascar Water Assessment Buy-In. It presents strategic and actionable recommendations to enhance water supply management systems across rural, water-stressed regions of southern Madagascar. We have prepared this set of illustrative recommendations in part to inform the new USAID Rano Maharitra project launched in May 2024, which seeks to improve rural households' access to drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene in target areas that include the Anosy and Androy.
Although surface and groundwater availability challenges remain across the Grand Sud, the most pressing challenges we identified are weak rural water supply management systems. In parallel, widespread and rapid infrastructure rehabilitation works currently underway are overwhelming the limited local institutional capacities. Specific problems include:
- Systemically dysfunctional village-level water supply infrastructure, including those rehabilitated within the last few years;
- A lack of technical and management capacity on the part of communes and communities to manage and maintain their own small-scale village supplies (boreholes installed with manual pumps). We note an absence of O&M from World Bank's water infrastructure plans, which could represent a programming gap for USAID to consider filling;
- A lack of administrative, financial, and technical capacity in communes and the Direction Régionale en Eau, Assainissement et Hygiène (DREAH)s to manage and effectively regulate affermage contracts;
- Underperforming private operator technical and management services, in large part due to inadequate tariff recovery;
- Widespread lack of commune and community readiness to transition from informal water supply system management to formal management (with rigid payment requirements);
- A lack of effective operational coordination mechanisms among donors and implementers within the sector; and
- BHA’s recently rehabilitated water points across Beloha and Tsihombe districts (Androy Region) are now non-functional. There are opportunities for collaboration between the USAID/HPN and USAID/BHA teams that reinforce integrated humanitarian/ development NEXUS programming