Download or read book Toward a Sustainable Approach to Water Service Delivery Methods in a Rural Context written by Kathryn S. Wesdyk and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "According to the World Health Organization (WHO), over two billion people lack access to safely managed drinking water services, accounting for over one million deaths worldwide each year. To focus needed attention on this crisis, the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals call for universal, equitable, safe, and affordable water service. This global challenge has proved to be particularly difficult in a rural context. Governments in developing regions often lack the resources, capital, and capabilities to provide and manage public services, to include drinking water. Many have turned to the private sector, foreign donors, and aid organizations to supply safe water. Historically, these programs have struggled to do so sustainably, over-prioritizing short-term infrastructure development at the expense of the long-term operation of the systems. Many water providers and their donors have focused on the number of facilities built and the number of people with access, driving the performance of the Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) sector by these metrics alone. Sustainability; however, cannot be described by system functionality or population coverage exclusively. The definition of the term should be expanded to include a wider variety of metrics that describe the long term operation and resiliency of the system, from the perspective of both the water suppliers and the communities they serve. A more nuanced view of sustainability is especially needed in rural communities where weak governance, low per capita resources, and high per capita costs of obtaining water access combine to present a substantial barrier to water service delivery. In recent years there has been recognition in the development sector that in order to improve sustainability, water providers should shift from a paradigm that relies on external support yet operates independently from other WASH actors, to one that combines grants and a strong enough revenue base to recover operational and maintenance costs in collaboration with WASH actors. Water providers must achieve a difficult balance that increases impact (increasing the amount of impoverished communities using safe water) with a model that will continue to perform. A broad, systematic review of WASH programs was conducted to develop a comprehensive summary of considerations for rural communities in developing regions to proactively develop their own water provision. The primary recommendations for community authorities seeking water service delivery are applied to a case study on the island of Île-à-Vache, Haiti."--from abstract.