Elsevier

World Development

Volume 28, Issue 5, May 2000, Pages 929-944
World Development

The Impact of Participation on Sustainability: An Analysis of the Malawi Rural Piped Scheme Program

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0305-750X(99)00155-2Get rights and content

Abstract

The Malawi rural piped scheme program exemplified the participatory approach to rural drinking water supply. Today, between three and 26 years after completion, the smallest schemes, and the newest one, are performing well, but about half the schemes are performing poorly, and a third of these are functioning abysmally. Two implementation decisions would have improved performance, namely cash contributions from consumers, and the construction of smaller schemes. The participatory approach sets up community organizations capable of managing very small rural piped gravity schemes, but it does not address the need of larger schemes for support from a competent external agency.

Introduction

For several decades, donors and governments have used participatory strategies in all kinds of poverty alleviation programs, in the belief that participation is the most effective means both to deliver and sustain benefits to the poor. Many such programs have now been completed for some time, presenting an opportunity to study the long-run impact of participation on sustainability.

Nowhere is research into this issue more relevant than for rural water supply. The emerging consensus on how better to deliver rural water supplies in the future assumes that communities will play an even bigger role than in the past, based on the belief that local organizations and institutions are best able to construct and maintain the supplies. Thus, the new approach to rural water supply rests on the same assumption about participation and sustainability that has long characterized so many poverty alleviation programs.

This article will explore the assumption about the link between participation and sustainability by presenting findings from a study of operation and maintenance on rural water supplies that were constructed under a program widely praised for its exemplary approach to community participation.

Section snippets

Background

During the 1970s, most major donors committed themselves to providing rural social services that would have the direct and immediate effect of reducing poverty. Governments and donors had the responsibility to provide these services, so the thinking went, both on humanitarian grounds and as a means to improve the productivity of the poor and thus raise their incomes International Labor Organization., 1977, Streeten, 1979, Streeten and Burki, 1978. Drinking water constituted one such service,

Malawi rural piped scheme program

The Malawi Piped Scheme Program refers to the activities of the Malawi government in building gravity schemes to provide drinking water to the rural population. These activities began in 1968, when the Ministry of Community Development and Social Welfare constructed the first small scheme. After successfully completing a second larger scheme, activities expanded nationwide, financed by the Christian Service Committee (a Malawian NGO), UNICEF, the United States, Denmark, Canada, and Oxfam (

Assessing sustainability

At the core of any assessment of sustainability for a piped scheme program is a judgement about whether the schemes have delivered an adequate and reliable supply of water to the target population for a sufficient period. Therefore, the first step in researching the impact of participation on sustainability in the Malawi program was to ascertain how well the schemes functioned in terms of supplying water to their intended consumers. This step also entailed evaluating the physical state of the

Improving the participatary model

The preceding analysis of the problems on the schemes points to some concrete ways to improve the impact of the participatory model on sustainability. With 20/20 hindsight one can see that in particular Malawi’s implementers made poor choices in regard to cash versus in-kind contributions for maintenance and to the physical size of the schemes. The schemes would likely be in at least somewhat better condition today, if other decisions had been taken on these two issues.

Effectiveness of the participatory model

The claims and promises about the sustainability of Malawi’s piped schemes were not put in quantitative terms, but certainly one was led to expect better performance and maintenance than what characterizes them today. What does this imply about the effectiveness of the standard participatory model in delivering sustainability?

The above findings do not contradict those of the two World Bank studies mentioned earlier, which concluded that participatory projects are more sustainable than those

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