Publication:Keep it working

Keep it Working

A field manual to support community management of rural water supplies By Eveline Bolt and Catarina Fonseca, IRC Technical Paper Series 36

Preface This book is written for staff working directly with communities to improve the management of their water supply, so for people sometimes known as ‘field workers’. It is written from a conviction about the need for community management of rural water supply systems. Our ideas are supported by what is said at many international meetings and by many sector professionals. Like them, we feel that governments cannot and should not manage all the water supply systems in the rural areas of their country. Instead, governments should create an enabling environment for communities to manage their systems alone or in partnership.

Communities are best aware of local demands and possible conflicts, of available water resources and of capacities of the various users to contribute to operation and maintenance. You, as field worker, are part of this so-called enabling environment. This book aims at being a helpful tool when working with communities that want to establish or improve the management of their water supplies. Such work requires a good insight into all sorts of elements related to sustainable water supply management, such as legal issues, possible technical hiccups in the system, power relations, gender and equity, and monitoring. Of course field workers already have a lot of insight into many of these elements. However, we also feel that the 20 fact sheets in the first part of this book will still provide useful reading.

Working with communities to establish or improve management of their water supplies also requires skills and tools to facilitate communication and community decisionmaking processes. That is why we added 29 tools in the second part of the book. They are referred to in the fact sheets. Some of the tools will no doubt be familiar, since the use of such participatory tools has been much propagated over the last 15 years. Some of them will probably be new. In quite a number of tools you will find an indication on how to ensure that gender and equity are taken into account.

The third part of the book has 16 checklists that can be helpful when working with communities. Some of the checklists address issues such as assessing the functioning of the water supply system or assessing cost recovery for operation and maintenance. Community members may start using these themselves once you have explained their use. A second category of checklists includes important questions when facilitating discussions on community management issues with community members.

These fact sheets, tools and checklists are referred to throughout the document. What makes this book special is the clear linkages between the issues raised in the fact sheets and the tools and checklists that enable you to get these issues discussed. Both the fact sheets and the tools have been sequenced to mirror the steps needed to organise and to practise community management. You can select fact sheets, tools and checklists suitable to the status of the water supply system and existing capacities in the community where you work. The matrices visualise how fact sheets, tools and checklists relate to each other.

We do not pretend that this set of tools is complete or can be applied in every situation. Indeed, we would very much appreciate receiving a copy of any additional tools or adaptations of the tools in this book that you may use or come across.. This will help us improve the book as we update it. Due recognition will of course be given to the source of all such material.

This book is only one part of the material being disseminated. Other material includes a number of videos on community management, a book for programme managers and district level staff, a book with the state of the art on community management, an advocacy leaflet, training for field workers, a Training of Trainers manual, a managers workshop and a web-site (www.irc.nl/manage) on community management. To obtain more information on these materials, you may either contact the organisation closest to you, or IRC. You can find the contact addresses in the back of the book.