Sustainable WASH Systems Learning Partnership: Context Analysis Uganda

Sustainable service delivery remains a huge challenge in the Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) Sector. Achieving sustainable WASH, as defined by USAID, is when country partners and communities take ownership of the service, and there are local systems to deliver inputs needed to maintain results and deliver impacts beyond the life of projects. In order to achieve this goal at scale, new approaches to WASH service delivery and sustainability are needed. The multi-year Sustainable WASH Systems Initiative (SWS) aims to develop, test, and document high potential approaches to engaging local WASH systems across multiple countries and contexts to advance sector knowledge in the development, application and scaling up of local systems in WASH while also providing concrete improvements to service delivery within the countries, districts and cities involved.

In Uganda, the SWS partnership seeks to develop and test a structured and replicable approach to understanding, engaging with, and strengthening district (rural) and small-town level systems for water and sanitation service delivery. The initiatives will build on existing coordination platforms and bring together all critical stakeholders, especially local governments, to improve understanding and find systems-level solutions to overcome service delivery constraints. The purpose of the context analysis is to provide a summary overview of the current situation in Uganda and a background on Kabarole, the selected district for the initiative’s interventions. The context analysis is one of the inputs for the design and start-up of the SWS Learning Partnership in the country.