Loughborough University
Browse

Effective water safety management of piped water networks in low-income urban settlements

Download (108.91 kB)
journal contribution
posted on 2013-08-16, 12:16 authored by Sam KayagaSam Kayaga
Spiralling low-income settlements are a big challenge to urban water utilities of developing countries. To extend and maintain water services to these settlements, urban water utilities need to develop innovative solutions for overcoming various physical/technical, institutional, structural/legal and financial/economic constraints associated with these informal areas. This paper draws from documented pilot projects of implementing community-managed Water Safety Plans (WSPs) in various developing countries, and synthesises necessary ingredients for effective implementation of WSPs in low-income urban settlements. Urban water utilities need to partner with community members, but the former should keep a facilitating/overseeing role, given the overly technical nature of WSPs. The terms of the partnership should be mutually agreed and well documented; the utility should allow full participation of the relevant community members in the overall Operation and Maintenance (O&M) plan for the low-income settlement, in order to enhance community ownership of the water supply system, and continuously develop the capacity of relevant community members. The relevant community members should be facilitated, through participatory approaches, to develop bespoke community-based WSPs along with simple monitoring tools. Implementing community-managed WSPs will be easier and more effective if O&M systems and community management approaches are already institutionalised within the water utility.

History

School

  • Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering

Research Unit

  • Water, Engineering and Development Centre (WEDC)

Citation

KAYAGA, S., 2013. Effective water safety management of piped water networks in low-income urban settlements. Journal of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene for Development, 3 (3), pp. 402 - 410

Publisher

© IWA Publishing

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publication date

2013

Notes

This article was published in the serial Journal of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene for Development [© IWA Publishing 2013]. The definitive peer-reviewed and edited version of this article is available at www.iwapublishing.com.

ISSN

2043-9083

Language

  • en

Usage metrics

    Loughborough Publications

    Categories

    No categories selected

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC