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Sustainable rural water supply in Africa: rhetoric and reality
conference contribution
posted on 2006-06-02, 10:16 authored by Peter Harvey, Robert ReedThe 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)
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WEDC ConferencePages
69148 bytesCitation
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 UniversityVersion
- 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
2003Notes
This is a conference paper.Other identifier
WEDC_ID:13260Language
- en
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