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Self Supply is defined as user investment in household water treatment, supply construction or up-grading, or rainwater harvesting. It is based on incremental improvements in steps which are easily replicable, with technologies affordable to users. Such improvements provide safer, more convenient and reliable water to many of those who live in dispersed households or on the periphery of inadequate or unreliable services. These are often the poorer and harder-to-reach members of society.
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Accelerating Self Supply involves national and local government, the private sector and households. In the long term the main actors are small scale-households and SMEs, which may be why it largely remains unrecognized and little documented. They are the backbone, but to establish an enabling environment for them to progress faster requires catalytic initiatives by external agencies (e.g UNICEF,WSP, RWSN) to make governments aware of the potential of this additional approach and then seed investment for governments to develop models appropriate to local political, physical and socio-economic conditions and take them to scale.
NGO often play an important role as implementer and facilitator. The investment in infrastructure is funded by the users themselves.
ACCESS then becomes largely self-sustaining. As for community supplies the monitoring on the ground is in the responsibility of the local government. The national government should monitor and support the enabling environment.
Self Supply provides the sustainable approach for water supply services for rural areas, where conventional community water supplies are not sustainable or not adequate, eg. in remote areas and areas with dispersed populations. In these situations per capita capital and recurrent costs rise sharply. Since public funding is already inadequate for conventional supplies, they tend to get by-passed in favor of those easier to cover. Sustainable solutions at community level are also vulnerable where there is easy access to cheaper alternative sources which can be developed at household level, and accelerated to acceptable levels.
Primary target group of Accelerating Self Supply are the households as user of the improved water sources and the private sector, who provide services to the households and can generate income. Household also benefit from Accelerating Self Supply as they can use their improved water sources for multiple uses such as productive use in agriculture which contributes to income generation and improvement of food security. As Self Supply is focusing on household water sources any effort to support Self Supply will contribute to support women and girls in their daily life. In terms of a pro poor perspective, Self Supply might need some complementary measures to really reach the poorest of the poor.
As secondary target group national and local governments are interested in supporting Self Supply as coverage will be increased within their territory by household initiatives and investment. User investments decrease the amount of government investments needed for the water supply sector.
In terms of institutional context Accelerating Self Supply works best where there is a local private sector capable to provide services and where there are local government and NGOs, who can support Self Supply e.g. by building up an enabling environment and training local entrepreneurs.
In terms of geographical distribution, Accelerating Self Supply works in all regions, particularly in regions with a rather high groundwater table or where there is a decent amount of rain fall.
In order to start Accelerating Self Supply in a country there is set of investments and requirements which have to be in place as preconditions:
1. High level political will and support on national level to support Self Supply as one service delivery model for water supply,
2. Resources in terms of at least two to three persons in the leading Ministry to follow up and monitor pilot studies and activities for Self Supply on the ground,
3. Sufficient reliable funding from government and external donors to keep activities going,
4. Human Capacities in the private sector and also within NGOs and other institutions such as academia to further develop technical solutions, to provide services and to follow up activities,
5. A framework of institutions and regulations which allow households a sustainable financing of self supply investments in their own water supplies.
Based on the experiences on Accelerating Self Supply in the field so far, the average cost per capita for self supply options such as rehabilitation of springs including training are between 4-8 US$ which is much lower as for many conventional water supplies, in particular in remote areas.
The approach of Accelerating Self Supply was inspired by field evidence in Nicaragua and Zimbabwe, where ongoing promotion of low cost technologies led to a remarkable improvement of coverage in rural areas. Additional support came from national governments such as Ministry of Water and Environment in Uganda, Ministry of Health in Zambia and other actors involved in Accelerating Self Supply, such as SDC, WSP, IRC in Ethiopia, WaterAid in Zambia or Unicef in Mali.
True about self supply in Africa. Taking a critical review, many of the available self supply options are not inclusive in nature. the challenge is how best we can modify the technologies to benefit the ‘excluded minority’ particularly the physically challenged, elderly and pregnant women.
Hi Ashabrick, thank you for the comment. Have you worked on a solution related to “self supply” in Africa? May be you can submit a solution related to this or the development work you have done. This could be interesting for our members.