IWA activities on Water Operators Partnerships
At present, almost 1 billion people live without access to improved drinking water sources and 2.5 billion lack access to improved sanitation. In order to reach Millennium Development Goal 7 (MDG7), access to sanitation has to be extended to at least 1.5 billion and a safe water supply to 500 million before 2015. The situation is better for water supply than for sanitation, but business as usual scenarios will be insufficient in achieving these targets.
Although each case differs in its complexity, common problems cut across many public water operators and municipal service providers, such as poor strategic management, weak financial and operational management, low funding priority, lack of sound human resources policy, poor staff skills, absent or weak customer service orientation, political interference, and little or no independent regulation or oversight.
The Water Operators Partnerships (WOPs) initiative provides a systematic means to address these common problems, based on mutual support and the belief that a well performing operator can help others to improve. Peer support has been the catalyst for transforming water operators from underperformers to champions. Many such operators, having received partner assistance, are then able to pass on their new knowledge, thereby generating a strong multiplier effect.
With its extensive utility membership and specialist expertise, the International Water Association is a lead knowledge development and implementing partner for WOPs at global and regional levels. IWA has strengthened its efforts to promote and broker WOP activities and a WOPs strategy and workplan has been developed for the IWA WOPs Programme.
IWA is a member of the Global WOPs Alliance (GWOPA).
A strategy to guide IWA's work on WOPs is available here.
The workplan includes five work packages:
IWA has grouped the various types of WOPs in a manner that makes it easy to understand the purpose and scope of each partnership type and thereby make it possible to identify good practices and produce supporting material and advices when brokering WOPs around the world.
The WOPs classification is described here.
The network of actors enabling WOPs is illustrated here.
Inter-regional WOPs involve partners from different regions of the World, including North-South and South-South partnerships. Inter-Regional WOPs are often comprehensive WOPs that last years and the scope of the support is broad. The travelling and subsistence expenses together with the task of overcoming social, cultural, and language barriers becomes sustainable only when the scope of the project is broad and the expected outputs are of a certain dimension. The GWOPA is working to provide the framework for such inter-regional WOPs.
Regional WOPs occur when the water operators in the partnership are from the same region. Regional WOPs do not suffer so much from cultural and social differences of the partners and the associated cost for travel and accommodation may be rather low. Most partnerships in the past have been regional partnerships. The GWOPA is financially and substantively supporting regional WOPs, and IWA is working as a WOPs broker and supporting regional and sub-regional structures, associations and water operators. Several regional WOPs Programmes have been established or are under development. A description of WOPs activities in the various regions can be found here:
Water operators being interested in entering into a WOP – whether mentoring or receiving - should benefit from past experiences and lessons learned. The GWOPA, IWA, USAID, ADB, IDB and professional water associations are therefore developing such knowledge bases. IWA and GWOPA shall do their best to coordinate the information flow between these web pages and databases to avoid overlapping work.
The IWA knowledge database, under development, will show best practices and lessons learned and the information will be underpinned with recommendations and supporting documents. Input data are being collected from existing databases, e.g. in the IWA organization and its network, and from written and verbal contacts with water operators, donors, international finance institutions, regional and national water operator networks, collaboration partners and other stakeholders.
IWA has developed a self assessment tool by way of a questionnaire with the objectives:
The WaterLinks web page for Asia (www.waterlinks.org) developed by USAID, ADB and IWA includes similar information and a survey.
Finally, the GWOPA, Cap-Net (UNDP), IWA and other key partners are collaboratively working to produce capacity development material and deliver training courses on Integrated Water Resource Management, IWRM, for water operators. Material on water demand management and Water Safety Planning has been developed for that purpose, and training courses will be organized throughout 2010.
For more information on any of the above, please contact steen.bjerggaard@iwahq.org
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