Recognising existing management of water supplies

Article derived from "Supporting community management of rural water supplies": When talking ‘management’ with communities it is needed to realise that people have been managing water, agriculture and other community development activities for ages. There is no need to establish a new management arrangement where the existing one has proven to be effective. It is also needed to realise that the way water supply systems are managed is not necessarily the same for all communities. At the same time, many management arrangements in the past concerned individual or family owned systems, which are very different from community systems.

Existing decision-making and management arrangement in a community are often insufficiently recognised or even overlooked. Projects or new managements proposition should be built on existing management knowledge and experience, promoting tailor-made approaches rather than trying to have communities adopt new arrangements. By doing so, duplicate efforts and waste of valuable time and energy are avoided, in a respectful ways towards communities. Which form the management arrangement should take depends on local circumstances and should be decided by the community itself. Existing structures are sometimes traditional, such as the council of elders or chiefs. Sometimes they are village development committees, women’s groups, village health committees or agriculture extension groups established in the context of a development project. It is useful to make an inventory of existing arrangements within the community. When discussing a structure for management of the water supply system it is important to take this into account.

The community can be assisted in identifying appropriate arrangements for managing their water supplies with a clear definition of roles, tasks and linkages to existing structures within and outside the community. Where the existing management arrangement is not appropriate to deal with the task at hand, additional training or the establishment of another water management structure may be considered. Existing management practices may also have to change when the number of people using the same water source increases rapidly. This can be the case where an existing system is expanded to cover households that had little or no access. It may for example become useful to divide the area covered by a committee into smaller areas that can be managed more easily by sub-committees. Arrangements for communication and co-ordination of work by the sub-committees will then need to be included.