The gaps in access to water and sanitation remain huge. Experience shows that increasing financing alone will not be enough to bridge these gaps. In fact, the biggest gaps are often in middle-income countries, such as India and Indonesia, which already have large national water and sanitation investment programs. Many cities in these countries do not have 24-hour water supply and many peri-urban and informal settlement populations still rely on expensive vendors or unsafe wells for drinking water.

Furthermore, the historical approach to the sector has paid limited attention to the people’s needs, particularly those of the poor. There has also been a focus on investment without adequate evidence of what works at scale. The large investments in the sanitation sub-sector, for example, have often not yielded concrete results because approaches have not focused enough on “soft measures” such as triggering demand for sanitation services and behavior change to sustain the use of services when they are available.

There is therefore a need for “soft support” in terms of capacity building and knowledge generation and dissemination to complement hard investments in infrastructure. These measures need to support all levels of government in planning, implementing, monitoring and managing water and sanitation services. The level of investment that is required in these soft measures, however, depends on many factors that need to be disaggregated, including specific sub-sector requirements, the local enabling environment, the nature of service provision – whether it is public or private, and the level of decentralization.

“Soft measures” need to be linked with results on the ground. A key issue remains understanding, measuring, and monitoring the value of capacity building and knowledge in the water and sanitation sector. Arguments to invest in these measures will only hold weight if they can be linked to results on the ground in terms of access to improved services. This requires re-thinking traditional methods of monitoring and reporting results.

As a starting point, it will be important to first reach a common understanding of what ‘soft measures’ mean for the water and sanitation sector. A specific objective will be that: “A common working definition of “essential soft measures” in the context of financing water and sanitation is established by 2015 and IFIs and governments use that definition consistently in their planning and auditing purposes.” Further analysis will then be needed to help guide allocations to “essential soft measures”.