Document
G. K. Adu-Wusu, L. Roberts & K. A. Debrah: Experiences on Multiple Use Dams in Sissala West District, Ghana
Plan Ghana works in the Sissala West district in north-western Ghana. The main livelihood of indigenes is rain-fed farming and livestock rearing. Northern Ghana experiences an 8-month long dry season each year, during which farming and livestock watering become extremely difficult. Food shortages occur and people lose their animals. Moreover, rainfall patterns are irregular, causing young crops to wither in incidental prolonged dry periods, a situation aggravated by climate changes. Plan partner communities requested support for the construction of dam facilities to support dry season farming and livestock watering. After feasibility studies, 8 dams were constructed with the aim of improving livelihoods and health of people through sale and consumption of produce from the following intended uses; Irrigation, Fish farming and Livestock watering. Over 1000 households are benefiting from the dams. A total of 95 hectares of land has been put under irrigation growing mainly vegetables. Leafy vegetables are now available on the market in the dam communities. Income levels have increased through the sale of surplus produce. Some community members have taken up fishing whilst livestock have sufficient water. Apart from the intended uses of the dams, they are serving other practical water needs which were not catered for in the design, and bring in additional sources of income; Moulding bricks, Watering dirt-roads and Household cleaning. Data collection on use demands and patterns, especially on the unexpected additional activities, needs to be continued to guide future multiple use of water projects in Plan’s MUS programme.[authors abstract]
M. Adank, B. Belete, M. Jeths: Costs and benefits of multiple uses of water: a case from Ethiopia
This paper presents a study conducted under the RiPPLE project1, with the objective to provide better insight in the costs and benefits of multiple use water services. In this study, the costs related to the provision of water services and the benefits related to water use were analysed for two cases in the East Haraghe zone, Ethiopia, each taking a different path towards multiple use services. In the Ido Jalala case, domestic water supply services were upgraded to enable small-scale irrigation, while in the Ifa Daba case, irrigation services were upgrades to also cater for domestic water use. In both cases, water was used for multiple uses by the community members, regardless of the water services provided. The study shows that in the studied cases, the benefits of multiple use easily outweigh the costs involved in providing water services. It also shows that with relatively small additional costs, single use water services can be upgraded to multiple use water services, which facilitate multiple uses, bringing along relatively high additional benefits. [authors abstract]
Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) has gained international recognition as an appropriate framework for meeting the challenges of water scarcity. IWRM is fully supported by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), where experts asked themselves how they and their partners could learn together and in an innovative and forward-looking way from the wealth of existing experience in water and watershed management. This question triggered an initiative named “Water, Land and People – Voices and insights from three continents”, which was implemented in Bolivia, India and Mali, facilitated by Intercooperation. In each of the three countries, a learning group of 12 to 15 participants from different sectors – farmers’ and water users’ associations, project teams, NGOs, private sector, government, SDC staff – jointly defined a learning agenda and deepened topics tools like story-telling to ensure a high level of authenticity while capturing experiences. Participants and facilitators appreciated this innovative tool for enabling them to break with the usual formal setting, see complex issues from previously unperceived angles, and challenge fixed mindsets.
The learning groups concluded that the learning process was most effective and motivating when intermediate results were immediately put to use as inputs for decision-making in other ongoing initiatives (as opposed to working in isolation to achieve a final product). In India, the learning group was consulted by the authorities and thus contributed to the elaboration of revised watershed guidelines. The three learning groups exchanged and presented their preliminary findings during the 4th World Water Forum in Mexico City in March 2006.
Moreover, each learning group presented its findings in an innovative and attractive manner, by putting video, audio and power-point presentations, short stories and comics into interactive presentation CDs. These country-specific products were then partially translated and assembled to form a global product available on DVD as well as on the Internet (www.waterlandpeople.net). This final product provides a rich resource base and is meant to be used by many actors on different levels, ranging from local stakeholders (e.g. water users’ associations and authorities), the SDC and partner institutions to policy-makers and the wider public.
This year’s case study award goes to Nigel Murimiradzomba from Plan Zimbabwe. Out of the submitted abstracts, his was considered the best and will now be developed into a full case study. His work deals with one of Plan’s programmes where the provision of drip irrigation kits was part of a rural water supply programme. This allowed farmers to also use water for gardening activities. The drip kits reduce water losses and enable better use of limited water supplies. One of his key findings is to link such programmes with production-market chain linkages i.e. input/seed suppliers, suppliers of technology and market outlets, so as to optimize the benefits of the programme.
Paper presented by Sally Suttonat the 5th RWSN Forum, Accra, Ghana, 2006.
Self supply is a rural water strategy rather than just low cost technologies. It builds on the largely unrecognised but great investment rural people have already made in their own water supplies, especially at household level. Particularly in areas where comunal approaches are of quetionable sustainability, people can be encouraged to improve their own supplies rathet than remaining dependent on the timing and policies of donors and governments. [authors abstract]
This is the background note for the session on MUS, sanitation and reuse for the MUS Thematic Group Meeting, Delft, 12-13 Feb 2007.
The multiple use services approach has been gaining recognition in South Africa over the last few years, expressed in a range of policy, research, implementation and advocacy initiatives. In 2005 a national seminar was held on the theme. One of the concerns raised was that local government is the key to implementation, but they had so far been rather absent from the discussions. In a follow-up to the 2005 seminar, a second seminar was convened by the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry (DWAF) and the MUS (Multiple Use Systems) project in partnership with WIN-SA (the Water Information Network of South Africa) and SALGA (the South African Local Government Association) on 25 October 2006. The objective of the seminar was to look at the implications for local government implementation of the mus approach. This focused on the guidelines for local government implementation of multiple use water services that DWAF is developing. Participants came from a cross-section of institutions: national government departments, provincial DWAF offices, local government, research institutions, NGOs and consultancies.
The importance of mus to realising goals of addressing poverty through water was emphasised. However, there are still no coherent, agreed upon, national definitions of multiple uses of water, that give clarity while leaving room for flexibility. It is agreed that livelihoods and Local Economic Development (LED) are at the heart of mus, and that the boundaries of that cannot be tightly set. Definitions can become an academic discussion, but are important as they have implications for mandates and for accounting and funding. Mapping of the different funding streams need to be combined to implement mus. This is complicated, as the agencies who administer them operate at different levels and with different procedures. Integrated Development Plans (IDPs), in theory, provide a mechanism for alignment between various agencies and plans, but in practice IDP processes are sometimes weak. IDPs could be the basis for assessing demand and needs for mus, considering supply issues, and enabling cooperative governance. Combining piped water supply with alternative water sources, especially rainwater harvesting, seems to provide the most practical way forward in the South African context. The lack of capacity at municipal level and how this may limit the implementation of mus which is a new and more demanding approach was raised as a concern. On the other hand, the integrated approach required for mus may also be an opportunity to achieve more impact and reduce poverty.
A range of activities were proposed including strengthened communication and advocacy and continuing the work on the guidelines for local government, especially in the area of financing mechanisms. This should be accompanied by the piloting multiple use initiatives in the context of municipal service delivery plans.
A recent Stockholm Environment Institute research project has looked at the patterns of domestic water use in rural and peri-urban areas in Vietnam, with a particular focus on micro enterprises undertaken in and around the household using domestic water supplies. The study took place in 7 provinces across Vietnam and involved over 100 households. The overall approach was based on conventional rapid participatory appraisal techniques, and included the use of interviews with key informants and households, focus group discussions, field observations and documentary analysis.
The study found that water had a significant role in productive activity in and around the home, both in production for household consumption and for income generation. The majority of households surveyed had a vegetable garden and/or were raising some type of livestock, usually pigs. Some of this food production was clearly for household consumption, thus increasing households’ food security, but some household crops were being cultivated exclusively for sale in the village market. Most families with more than 2 pigs were also selling pork.
Water was also crucial to other home-based income-generating activities (IGAs), particularly for those undertaken by female members of the household. The most common household IGA observed was the production of food products, and these enterprises were generally run primarily – and often entirely – by the women of the extended household. In many cases, the male head of household and older sons worked outside the household area, either farming or as wage labourers; working on their own, the women were able to produce food items for sale while having sufficient time to raise children and take care of the household domestic needs. This pattern held true in both rural and peri-urban areas and means that these activities are of great significance in gender as well as livelihoods terms.
Service-based businesses also offered specific benefits to female household members. A motorbike washing business in a peri-urban area of Thai Binh illustrated the advantages of this type of micro enterprise, both in terms of how it meshed with child-rearing and other household demands and with respect to the low level of investment and skills required. The female owner of the business washed five motorbikes in a typical day, noting it was something she did in her spare time; for start-up, all she had needed was a pump (for drawing water from the river), soap and an air pressure hose (for drying the bikes). The woman estimated her daily profit at VND10,000-15,000 (US$0.62-0.94): a significant sum of money to her, and earned from only an hour or two of work a day.
While many of these IGAs were not seen as sources of prosperity for rural households (in contrast, for example, to farming shrimp and fish, working in the city, or having equipment and machinery to run larger businesses), people did believe the additional income was essential to household security. There were also instances in which IGAs had been used to generate sufficient investment capital for households to move into more lucrative businesses. One family in Thai Binh, for example, had used profits from raising pork and producing rice wine to save enough money to join with two other families in buying a car for a taxi service. This family’s experience thus illustrates how water-dependent small-scale enterprise can serve as a ladder out of poverty.
From: ‘Productive uses of domestic water: a household-level study from Vietnam’ by Stacey Noel, John Soussan and Nguyen Phuong Thao. To be published in 'Sustainable Development of Water Resources, Water Supply and Environmental Sanitation: Proceedings of the 32nd WEDC Conference', November 2006. Contact Stacey Noel at the Stockholm Environment Institute for more information
The winning case study for the 2005 award was Laba Hari Budhathoki of NEWAH in Nepal. It described the broad benefits of an integrated water, sanitation and hygiene project that also included promotion of kitchen gardening. NEWAH used the award to undertake a follow-up study, and you can now read a full report on how gardening was promoted in the project, and the impacts.
This report present the findings of a case study on the productive use of water in urban areas that was carried out in the low-income neighbourhoods of Bhuj, Gujarat in Western India.