As rural water supply coverage rates rise across many countries, attention is increasingly being paid to finding and implementing cost-effective mechanisms to ensure this improved initial access is sustained over time. Conventional approaches to maintenance have largely been based on voluntary community-based management with communities taking on the burden of maintenance themselves, with limited, if any, support from external agencies or local government. Recently, there have been attempts to professionalize maintenance services and make these services affordable at the point of delivery.

The Sustainable WASH Systems Learning Partnership (SWS) is piloting factor mapping workshops to improve stakeholders’ understanding of complex WASH systems and align their perspectives on the key components and the interactions between them that lead to improved service delivery outcomes. Factor mapping is a type of focus group activity that enables participants to visually represent the interactions between different factors in a system.

The Northern Uganda Water Supply Services (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 Sustainable Water and Sanitation in Africa (SUWASA) program was implemented from 2005–2009 to improve access to safe, reliable, affordable, and sustainable water and sanitation services for unserved and underserved urban populations in sub-Sahara Africa. The program fostered urban water sector reforms to solve policy, institutional, regulatory, financial, and operational challenges that hindered the effective delivery of sustainable water and sanitation services for urban residents in nine African nations.