While governments and development partners focus on improving community and utility-managed water supplies to ensure access for all, hundreds of millions of people are taking actions to supply their own water. In the WASH sector household investment in construction and improvement of facilities is widely employed in sanitation but in water similar efforts are ignored. Recognition of the contribution of self-supply towards universal access to water and its full potential, is hampered by a lack of data, analysis and guidance. This well-reasoned source book highlights the magnitude of the contribution of self-supply to urban and rural water provision world-wide, and the gains that are possible when governments recognise and support household-led supply development and up-grading. With limited public finances in low- (and many middle-) income countries, self-supply can fill gaps in public provision, especially amongst low-density rural populations. The book focuses on sub-Saharan Africa as the region with the greatest predicted shortfall in achieving the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal for water. Household supplies can be created, or accelerated to basic or safely managed levels, through approaches that build on the investment and actions of families, with the availability of technology options and cost-effective support from the private and public sectors. The role of self-supply needs greater recognition and a change in mindset of governments, development partners and practitioners if water services are to be extended to all and no-one is to be left behind.
As coverage with improved water supply increases, those left behind are increasingly those most expensive to serve – households in remote areas and/or with low-density populations. Globally these are more and more resorting to their own solutions (self-supply) but in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) suffer from non-existent public and private sector services to ensure good standards. A few SSA countries are now developing such support services, realising that without including self-supply, universal coverage (SDG 6.1) cannot be achieved. Supporting self-supply cost-effectively leverages additional funds from households, builds up sustainable services with improved local technical and business skills for those by-passed by community water supplies (CWS). It is a complementary approach focussing on incremental improvements, rather than just a single donor-dependent solution. Piloting and going-to-scale show a win-win situation for local rural inhabitants and also for governments. Engineers should consider promoting self-financed supply improvements, particularly where low user numbers make CWS un-affordably expensive.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.