Once more ex Africa aliquid boni − to paraphrase the Latin tag (original here). I say this as I came across for the first time the other day the excellent paper Managing water supply and sanitation services to developing communities: key success factors by Professor C. F. Schutte of the University of Pretoria. His ‘key success factors’ are:
1. Developing credibility of the organisation providing WatSan services with the community it serves:
(a) Creating an organisation-wide culture of service to customers,
(b) Ensuring reliability in the water supply, and
(c) Ensuring community involvement.
2. The creation of a culture focussing on maximising income and minimising losses:
(a) Create a culture and awareness of focussing on generation and collection of income, and
(b) Create a culture of cost consciousness and focus on minimisation of losses.
The paper has several ‘pearls of wisdom’ − for example:
The typical approach of a bureaucratic type of organisation is that it functions as a cost centre. This means expenditure is budgeted for and the approved budget is spent irrespective of what the income is. To be successful a water services organisation must operate as a business centre which means that expenditure must be linked to income. This requires that the financial systems must support such an approach and furthermore that a culture of cost consciousness must be established throughout the organisation – with management leading by example.
This is a really good paper, well worth reading in full.
About Me
- Duncan Mara
- University of Leeds, United Kingdom
- I'm an emeritus professor of civil engineering at the University of Leeds in England. I've been working on low-cost sanitation in developing countries since the mid-1970s, and also on low-cost wastewater treatment and reuse. I was a lecturer at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, 1970-73 and then a senior lecturer at the University of Dundee, Scotland, 1974-79 before moving to Leeds in late 1979. I was a visiting professor of sanitary engineering at the Universidade Federal da Paraiba in Campina Grande, northeast Brazil, during 1976-95, and since 1996 I have been a visiting professor of environmental engineering at the Instituto Cinara, Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia.