Operational and Minor Maintenance Expenditure (OpEx)

Operations and minor maintenance expenditure is the costs of routine minor maintenance needed to keep water and sanitation systems running at the designed performance. It includes recurrent, regular and on-going expenditure on labour, fuel, chemicals, materials, or purchases of bulk water. Operational expenditure also includes ‘household coping costs’ by which households spend money to achieve a satisfactory level of service; i.e. cleaning products for sanitary facilities, energy costs, etc.

Operations and minor maintenance expenditure does not include major repairs or renewals of water or sanitation infrastructure. This is considered expenditure on capital maintenance (CapManEx).

Examples

Benchmarks capital maintenance expenditure Based on research from the WASHCost project, the minimum operations and minor maintenance expenditure to provide a basic level of water service with a borehole and handpump (at 2011 prices) range from US$ 0.5 per person to just over US$ 1 per person (see table 1). For all piped schemes, including mechanised boreholes and piped supplies, the costs range from US$ 0.5 to just over US$ 5 per person.