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Sustainable rural water supply in Africa: rhetoric and reality

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conference contribution
posted on 2006-06-02, 10:16 authored by Peter Harvey, Robert Reed
The terms 'sustainability' and ‘sustainable’ can be found repeatedly throughout Government policy documents and the mission statements of external agencies in the rural water supply sector in Africa. However, how many institutions in the sector are truly committed to the concept of sustainability, or have a firm idea of what it means? This paper is based on research undertaken at the Water, Engineering and Development Centre (WEDC) under DFIDfunded Knowledge and Research project ‘Guidelines for Sustainable Handpump Projects in Africa’ (R7817). The early stages of the research identified a surprising range of definitions of sustainability and perceptions of what the term means. Based on existing literature and definitions, for the purposes of the project a sustainable rural water supply has been defined as one in which: ‘the water sources are not over-exploited but naturally replenished, facilities are maintained in a condition which ensures a reliable and adequate water supply, the benefits of the supply continue to be realised by all users over a prolonged period of time, and the service delivery process demonstrates a cost-effective use of resources that can be replicated’.

History

School

  • Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering

Research Unit

  • Water, Engineering and Development Centre (WEDC)

Published in

WEDC Conference

Pages

69148 bytes

Citation

HARVEY and REED, 2003. Sustainable rural water supply in Africa: rhetoric and reality. IN: Harvey, P. (ed). Towards the millennium development goals - Actions for water and environmental sanitation: Proceedings of the 29th WEDC International Conference, Abuja, Nigeria, 22-26 September 2003, pp. 115-118.

Publisher

© WEDC, Loughborough University

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2003

Notes

This is a conference paper.

Other identifier

WEDC_ID:13260

Language

  • en

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    WEDC 29th International Conference

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