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Community management - lessons from Rwanda

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conference contribution
posted on 2018-02-12, 15:08 authored by Susanne Niedrum
Development agencies continue to think of community management as the solution to the sustainability of rural water supplies despite the fact that successful examples are rare. Progress has been made, but it has been painfully slow. At the beginning of the Decade, communities were expected to manage new water supplies after only a few hours or days training. Nowadays many projects have ‘community management’ components which work with the community to train them to manage their water supply. But even so, there are very few rural water supplies which, two or three years after the departure of the development agency, are still running. The “soft” components of projects are given insufficient priority. Lessons learnt are insufficiently documented and insufficiently disseminated with the result that mistakes continue to be repeated and millions of aid dollars continue to be wasted. It is time to ask the question: Is community management a viable option. If so, what conditions are necessary for it to work? The aim of this paper is to share the experience of community management of rural water supply in Rwanda.

History

School

  • Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering

Research Unit

  • Water, Engineering and Development Centre (WEDC)

Published in

WEDC Conference

Citation

NIEDRUM, S., 1994. Community management - lessons from Rwanda. IN: Pickford, J. et al. (eds). Affordable water supply and sanitation: Proceedings of the 20th WEDC International Conference, Colombo, Sri Lanka, 22-26 August 1994, pp.52-54.

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

1994

Notes

This is a conference paper.

Other identifier

WEDC_ID:11605

Language

  • en

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    WEDC 20th International Conference

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