Water for Africa Final Evaluation Report

Executive Summary

In October 2000, Water for People (WFP) received $595,000 in funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of International Affairs, to develop the Water for Africa program. This program was designed to help the growing numbers of urban poor in slums around African cities obtain safe drinking water while improving health and hygiene behaviors and sanitation practices. The program was unique in its focus on the development of sustainable local capacity through training and education activities, group formation, increased civic involvement and policy enactment. This stands in contrast to more traditional approaches that emphasize the building of needed facilities such as wells, public water kiosks, latrines and other structures.

Eleven primary projects were provided funding through local nongovernmental organizations, each for approximately $20,000, in the countries of Malawi, Zambia, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. Collectively these projects targeted 42 communities where water and sanitation facilities were nonexistent or severely inadequate.

To gauge the successes of the project, document activities and inform future efforts, an evaluation conducted by an independent firm was funded. As part of the evaluation, grantees collected baseline data on water-related disease, access to water and sanitation facilities and other community-relevant indicators to establish a baseline assessment of major issues. Mid- and final project reports discussed major process accomplishments, policy changes, group formation, and observed behavioral improvements in relation to identified baseline measures.

Some of the overall successes of the Water For Africa program include:

1. Health and water-related improvements including greater community awareness and understanding of health and hygiene issues; improved water handling and storage activities; changes in personal hygiene behavior in the form of consistent hand washing and sanitary latrine use; and improved methods of garbage management and disposal.
2. Greater community engagement and participation in a host of areas including community assessment activities; education and training sessions related to sanitation, hygiene behavior and water management; and lobbying and advocacy work with other stakeholder groups.
3. Impacts to policy and governance including new policy development and enactment, improved regulation enforcement, and more responsive governance on the part of various governmental officials.
4. Leveraged infrastructure improvements that led to newly constructed water and sanitation facilities such as water tanks, boreholes, latrines, public water kiosks and sanitary garbage pits.

Final reports submitted by project managers detailed a number of important accomplishments that help to reveal the local flavor and impact of the above successes. Some of these include:

• Under the Child-to-Child (CTC) health education program in Kisumu, Kenya, 1,040 students across 12 schools became members of newly formed CTC health clubs. They learned about health and hygiene issues and shared lessons with a reported 4,500 additional students and 13,500 members of the general public. Health messages were delivered through peer teaching, songs, dance and dramatic performances.
• In Uganda, collaboration with local workers of the public health department was greatly improved and led to the enactment of regular sanitation inspection visits at settlements and the offering of scheduled immunizations to residents.
• In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, a water user committee established a “Constitution of Water Users” as a guideline for the operation and management of their water system, articulating stakeholder roles and responsibilities. This was seen as a model policy document and, consequently, is being adopted and utilized by all water user committees in the Temeke municipality.
• Capacity building strategies resulted in the leveraging of more than $200,000 of new infrastructure resources that supported the development of hand washing stations and latrines at schools, public water points and kiosks, garbage pits and dumpsters, and bathing facilities. Donors included World Vision, UNICEF, the
  French Embassy in Kenya, Rotary, Australian Aid, and local social action funds and city councils.
• During a November 2002 end-of-program workshop in Dar es Salaam, the East and Central Africa Peri-Urban Partnership (ECAPP) was formed by the program partners to disseminate lessons learned, share new ideas on providing assistance in slums and to raise funding for capacity building and construction of additional water and sanitation facilities.

Many lessons were learned over the short course of this project. Future efforts designed in a manner similar to the Water For Africa program (i.e., with a focus on capacity building, development and support) may be strengthened through these lessons, which include the following:

• When possible, divide the larger program into distinct phases (e.g., planning, strategy development and implementation) with clearly defined goals for each in order to better build capacity at each level, ensure greater levels of sustainability
  and achieve greater successes.
• Complement capacity development efforts with funding opportunities so that communities can leverage and/or implement infrastructure improvements that match their greater levels of knowledge and management expertise.
• Emphasize, where appropriate for community settings, proven program models such as Child-to-Child (CTC) and Participatory Hygiene and Sanitation Transformation (PHAST) to ease training requirements, implement programs with greater efficiency and support a greater likelihood of success.
• Fund projects for periods of no less than two years to ensure that enough time can elapse to observe impacts, as reflected in measured indicators.
• Include evaluation activities and methods that collect data on both short- and long-term effects and the sustainability of both process impacts and infrastructural improvements.
• Utilize participatory action research methods to foster community learning, better uses of data and long-term project sustainability.