Although IRC had been engaged in planning for local water governance and integrated urban water management before, its focus on district water and sanitation master planning really took off around 2018, when it started supporting the development of master plans in Asutifi North in Ghana, Banfora in Burkina Faso and Kabarole in Uganda. In the years that followed, district water and sanitation master planning was scaled up and replicated in other districts in these three countries and beyond. In the process, it became clear that WASH master planning involves long-, medium- and short-term cycles of planning, implementation, monitoring and reflection. Also, it became clear that master planning can serve as a strong starting point for collective action, contribute to the strengthening of local systems and help attract sources of funding to some extent. And that the scaling and replication processes have followed a variety of pathways.
However, limitations of planning at district level have been observed as well. These include:
- Lack of scale: Interventions identified in the district master plans can be too small to attract potential sources of funding, such as from development banks.
- Boundaries of service providers do not overlap with the district boundaries: Especially with increasing “utilitisation” of rural water supply (and sanitation), service providers increasingly serve areas which comprise several districts.
- The limited role of local government as service authority: The idea of local government as a service authority, ensuring water and sanitation services for all its constituents and overseeing and regulating water and sanitation service providers, is not always a reality. Although district master planning can help strengthen local governments’ roles in contexts where they are supposed to take up these responsibilities, this may not be relevant in every context.
- Fragmentation: Development of a large number of district water and sanitation master plans places high demands on the facilitation and support of such processes.
This begs the question asked in the title of whether the district is the right level for undertaking area-based participatory strategic planning processes, or whether it makes more sense to focus such processes at a higher institutional level (e.g. regional, provincial, etc.). This is, of course, highly context dependent.
In Rwanda for example, piped water schemes are increasingly managed by the national water utility WASAC, with the role of local government as service authority under discussion. In Ghana on the other hand, districts are the unit at which planning takes place and most service providers have service areas within the administrative district boundaries. As such, the district level can be considered the right level for area-based planning. Following the development of the Asutifi North master plan in Ghana, different pathways to scaling of district WASH master planning have been observed, as described in the recently published briefing note Pathways to universal WASH coverage in Ghana: lessons from scaling Asutifi North’s master planning approach . The identified pathways include replication in other districts in the Ahafo Region, with some aggregation at the regional level (pathway 1), with other pathways focused on on-demand support for replication elsewhere (pathway 2), replication by other NGOs (pathway 3) and broader roll-out via the National Development Planning Commission (pathway 4). Regional government was found to have the ability to play an important role in facilitating the development and implementation of district plans at scale, and in consolidating fundable elements from multiple district WASH master plans into fundable regional plans, with higher economies of scale.
This shows there is not one simple answer to the question “Is the district the right level for strategic water and sanitation master planning” to ensure sustainable water and sanitation services for all. Working with our government and non-governmental partners, we are increasingly learning what the best answer is to this question in different contexts, and what role actors at different levels can play. We are excited to continue learning and discussing this as we move forward.