Sustainable financing of WATSAN

If the trend in coverage for water supply and sanitation that prevailed during the International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade continues in the 1990s, then at the dawn of the 21st Century almost 1 billion people will still be without access to clean safe water and 2.2 billion to environmental sanitation - or one fifth and two fifths respectively of the population in developing countries, over 75 percent of whom will still be in rural areas despite rural-urban migration [UNICEF, 1995] . If this is not to become the optimistic scenario, sustainable financing strategies in the sector will need to be examined more holistically. Any financing strategy must take account of the “water environment” in which the issue is not whether water is an ‘economic’ or a ‘public/private’ good, but rather that an ‘economic resource’. Its management entails not only its extraction, use and re-use, but a holistic approach in which the financing strategies are derived from a socioeconomic and long-term environmental perspective — rather than only an estimation of costs and sources of funds. In the case of rural and peri-urban sanitation, the issue is not so much that of public/private or hardware/ software but rather of attitudinal change and ‘effective’ demand for increasing and improving access. This paper examines some of the financing issues in the sector within the framework of sustainable development.