Lake Victoria Region Water and Sanitation Initiative
Supporting Secondary Urban Centers in the Lake Victoria Region in order to contribute to the Achievement of the Millennium Development Goals.
Starting in February 2009, UNESCO-IHE will participate in the Lake Victoria Region Water and Sanitation Initiative (LVRWSI).
SNV, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, the Gender and Water Alliance and UNESCO-IHE have entered into a partnership arrangement with UN-Habitat for the implementation of the capacity building component of this programme that is funded by multiple bilateral and multilateral donors.
The capacity building programme has been initiated to support pro-poor water and sanitation investments in the secondary urban centers in the Lake Victoria Region, which over the years have received little or no support and yet continue to bear the brunt of rural-to- urban migration.
It aims at building institutional and human resource capacities at local and regional levels for the sustainability of improved water and sanitation services.
Furthermore, it will allow the benefits of upstream water sector reforms to reach the local level in the participating urban centers.
A reduction of the environmental impact of urbanisation in the Lake Victoria Basin also forms part of the programme’s aims.
In the first phase ten towns will be involved, among which are Homa Bay and Kisii in Kenya, Bukoba and Muleba in Tanzania and Masaka and Kyotera in Uganda. Mutukula, on the Uganda-Tanzania border, will be the seventh town in the first phase. In all, a total of 24 towns will be involved.
Need for Capacity Building
The on-going water sector reforms in the three East African countries aimed at promoting good governance and improving sector performance have created huge capacity demands in secondary urban centers.
Decentralisation and devolution of roles and responsibilities from central to local government and other intermediate level bodies has created new administrative structures with additional roles and responsibilities.
These require new capacities in terms of financial resource mobilisation and management; negotiation and managerial skills; gender mainstreaming; knowledge sharing; and development of methodologies and tools.
The main purpose of these efforts is to ensure the achievement of Millennium Development Goal 7 and specifically target 3: to halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation.
Secondary Towns
According to the 2005 UN-HABITAT Global Report on Water and Sanitation in the World’s Cities, secondary towns also suffer from the effects of their size and economy in terms of their ability to deliver services, characterised by an unstable population, a small revenue base and limited capacity for development and maintenance of services.
A combination of poor planning and design, inefficient operations and inadequate maintenance means that the services that do exist are often of poor quality and have limited coverage.
Local sanitation problems are repeatedly solved at the expense of the wider environment as discharged untreated waste pollutes ground and surface waters.
Compounding the problem is the reality of the limited skills available within the local authorities of these secondary towns, skills required to address their impending water and sanitation concerns.
Training and capacity building in the LVRWSI
Under the LVRWSI, training and capacity-building is considered to be an important element in supporting and sustaining the infrastructure interventions.
A stakeholder workshop on capacity-building, held in October 2006, elaborated on six thematic areas in which capacity should be built:
- Pro-Poor Governance
- Local Economic Development
- Utility Management
- Urban Catchment Management
- Advocacy and Awareness Raising
- Gender Mainstreaming and inclusion of Vulnerable Groups
These themes are to be linked and integrated with the overall urban planning efforts in the towns.
The capacity building project will be prepared and guided by an international consortium consisting of SNV, the Gender and Water Alliance, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and UNESCO-IHE, and will be carried out by regional and local capacity builders.
UNESCO-IHE will take up the subjects of utility management and urban catchment management, and has formed a five-member team to implement the work that will consist of situational analysis, training needs assessment, preparation of generic training materials, training of trainers, coaching and capacity enhancement for knowledge development and management.
The team consists of Marco Schouten, Mariska Ronteltap, Hans van Bruggen, Saroj Sharma and Maarten Blokland (project manager) and the time input by UNESCO-IHE will be about 370 days over about one and a half year, starting in February 2009.
The value of the contract is about US$ 500,000.