B. van Koppen, S. Smits, P. Moriarty, and F. Penning de Vries: Community-scale multiple-use water services: ‘MUS to climb the water ladder’

The Challenge Program on Water and Food-supported MUS project (PN28) developed and tested ‘multiple-use water services’ (‘MUS’). This new approach to water services takes multiple water needs of rural and peri-urban communities as the starting point for planning and design of new systems or rehabilitations. By overcoming the administrative boundaries between single-use sectors, MUS contributes more sustainably to more dimensions of wellbeing than single-use approaches: health, freedom from drudgery, food and income. The action-research took place in 25 study areas in eight countries in five basins. The project brought global, national, intermediate-level and local partners together who were champions of MUS at the time in five benchmark basins of the Challenge Programme on Water and Food (CPWF). At community-level, the project identified generic models for implementing MUS. This was done through pilot-implementation of innovative multiple-use water services and by analyzing de facto multiple uses of single-use planned systems. It was found that by providing 50-100 lpcd, so doubling or tripling the common design norms in the domestic sector, multiple cost-effective benefits could be achieved from homestead-scale MUS. At the intermediate, national, and global level, the project’s ‘learning alliances’ engaged in the wide upscaling of these community-level MUS models, with the aim to establish an enabling environment to provide every rural and peri-urban water user with water for multiple uses. [authors abstract]