Community participation in small city water supply schemes in Sri Lanka

Community participation is a new approach adopted to address many fundamental issues prevailing in implementation and O&M in small city water supplies. Lack of funds to improve the WS systems, high percentage of non-revenue water resulted in imbalance between expenditure and revenue, schemes expansions without proper technical assessment, water rights and competition in water use, consumer unawareness towards the safety of WS schemes and water sources were resulted to unsatisfactory performance in technical, financial and management of the majority of small city WS systems. Mobilizing of communities in small city WS is not easy due to its magnitude and heterogeneous society. This is more difficult in schemes where augmentation and expansion are taking place, as commitments are completely different between existing and new consumers. However, with all these constraints, pilot level Kegalle small city scheme in Sri Lanka has made remarkable achievements in solving these issues and emphasized the adaptability of community participation approaches in small city WS schemes.