This blog post discusses key findings and lessons learned from an evaluation of the long-term sustainability of selected components from the USAID-funded Environmental Services Program (ESP) in Indonesia. The program was implemented from 2004–2010 and included capacity-building efforts to improve financing and management of Indonesian municipal water utilities.
USAID recognizes that strong local systems are needed to maintain functional water and sanitation services and daunting challenges are associated with sustaining these services over time. The Sustainable WASH Systems (SWS) Learning Partnership was developed through a co-creation process and demonstrates the power of collaborative, iterative design.
As cities grow, the supply of clean water and sanitation cannot always keep up—particularly in countries like Indonesia, where only one in three urban families have access to clean piped water. To help tackle sustainable water supply and wastewater treatment issues in Indonesia, the USAID Indonesia Urban Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Penyehatan Lingkungan untuk Semua (IUWASH PLUS) project has been working to extend the reach of water and sanitation services while simultaneously strengthening their financial foundations.
Tagbilaran, a city in central Philippines, is considered a tourist gateway to popular destinations, with great economic potential. The city, however, has struggled to develop an effective water and septage treatment infrastructure. USAID, through its Strengthening Urban Resilience for Growth with Equity (SURGE) project, partnered with the Tagbilaran City government to plan for a new septage management system.
The Northern Uganda Water Supply Services Project (NUWATER (formally NUWSS) was a three-year initiative funded by USAID/Uganda. The NUWATER contract was signed on June 10, 2008, more than a year after the original feasibility study that provided the foundation for project design, for a period of 36 months and a total life-of-project funding of just under $3 million. The objective of the project was to assist the local authorities with reestablishing their water supply services with initial focus on the northern Uganda towns of Kitgum and Pader.
Around the world, only 71 percent of people use safely managed drinking water and only 39 percent use safely managed sanitation services. In sub-Saharan Africa, those numbers plummet to 24 percent for water, and data are insufficient to estimate sanitation use, according to Joint Monitoring Programme 2015 statistics.
On December 2, 2015, the African Water Association (AfWA) entered into partnership with USAID West Africa by signing the Cooperative Agreement No AID-624-A-1600003. Under this agreement, USAID/West Africa‘s Regional Program commits to invest a sum of $2,000,000 to support the WASH – AfWA Regional Institutional Capacity Building Program (AfriCap).
Following repeated large-scale humanitarian emergencies in the Sahel, USAID recognized that continuing to treat these recurrent crises as acute emergencies is extremely costly and does not effectively address their underlying causes. Resilience and Economic Growth in the Sahel - Enhanced Resilience (REGIS-ER) is a multi-sectoral resilience project that works to end the vicious cycle of crisis and help the Sahel’s most vulnerable populations stay firmly on
Success in the water and sanitation sector cannot be defined by only the number of boreholes drilled or toilets built. In addition to helping communities gain first-time access to improved water and sanitation services, USAID is focusing on building strong, self-reliant, systems to deliver services beyond the life of our projects. That not only means adapting our approach, but also expanding how we measure outcomes.
The USAID Philippine Sanitation Alliance (PSA) was a four-year program (October 1, 2007–September 30 2011) that worked with public and private sector partners to reduce public health risks, protect biodiversity and other natural resources by developing and implementing stakeholder-driven sanitation initiatives.
