Sustainable Services means that water users have reliable and affordable access to enough water of sufficiently high quality to meet their daily needs. There are many ways that such access can be achieved, from household self-supply to large-scale water utilities.

While community management (with varying levels of external support) remains the dominant management model worldwide in low- and middle-income countries, there is increasing diversity of management models and practices involving combinations of public, private, NGO and community agreements, operating modalities and regulation. However, this growing role for private and social-enterprise operators, needs support in achieving life-cycle cost recovery, and some levels of subsidy will almost inevitably be needed. The Uptime Consortium has demonstrated that Results-Based Contracting is a promising way to target subsidies from blended finance trust funds to achieve better service delivery for water users and greater transparency and efficiency for subsidy funders.

Thematic Priorities (2024-2030)

• §Systematic institutional strengthening: sharing lessons learned on strengthening local and national systems, and practical approaches and overcoming tensions between working with the grain of existing social and institutional structures that are likely to be more sustainable, but less inclusive to some marginalised groups.
• §Professionalisation: Documenting and sharing management models, professional development and management practices, and their enabling systems at local and national levels.
• §Regulation: engaging with regulators and sharing experiences and identifying good practices in rural and small-town regulation on how to balance tensions and trade-offs between competing economic, social, political and environmental priorities.
• §Financing of life-cycle costs and exploring ways to increasing financial sources and financial viability of rural water services across different contexts.
• §Resilient services: sharing emerging practices and solutions for increasing the resilience of rural water service providers – with a  specific focus on climate resilience, which has be identified by RWSN members as one of their main challenges.

To find out more or to get involved, join the Sustainable Services community on dgroups.

Useful Links

• Uptime
• USAID REAL-Water
• WASH Agenda for Change
• IRC WASH 
• Life Cycle Costing Approach - developed by the WASHCost Project
• Everyone, Forever - sustainable water services initiative by Water For People