Entrepreneurs help equality by improving access to WASH

Imagine living without easy access to safe water, sanitation and hygiene: this is the reality for billions of people around the world. In the Asia-Pacific region, the urgent need for basic infrastructure such as toilets, sewers, and clean, piped water has led to an influx in civil society organisations (CSOs) seeking to work with small-scale private and social enterprises and entrepreneurs to deliver these essential services to low-income communities.

Enterprise in WASH, a two-phased project conducted by the Institute for Sustainable Futures (ISF) between 2013-2018, investigated how well enterprises in service delivery and supply chains in WASH were able to meet this need. The first phase, funded by the Australian Government’s Australian Development Research Awards Scheme (ADRAS) through the Australian Civil Society WASH Fund (2013-2016), sought to identify knowledge and skills gaps and viable business models suitable specifically for rural areas – home to the poorest communities – in Indonesia, Vietnam and Timor-Leste. The subsequent extension phase (2016-18) addressed gaps discovered during the earlier work, paying particular attention to the role of women in WASH and to strengthening business enterprise development via intermediary organisations such as local governments. In addition to Indonesia and Vietnam, this second phase also took in Cambodia.

Our greatest achievement is perhaps the changed mind-set of the people in the organisations we worked with, including the civil society organisations, private enterprises, local governments and our funder, DFAT. Their collaboration now has a real chance of bringing WASH to the communities where it’s most needed.

— Juliet Willetts, Institute for Sustainable Futures

Strengthening the role of CSOs

Among the challenges identified in Phase 1 is a sanitation marketing approach that rendered products and services more expensive for the poor in remote locations, and a focus on the private sector that excluded local government, a key enabler to ensure that poor communities are reached.

According to Professor Juliet Willetts, “It was commendable that our civil society partners wanted to support local entrepreneurs, but it was apparent that a more nuanced approach was required to also benefit the poor. For low-income communities, affordability is key, and focusing on the private sector exclusively may not deliver that. To be effective, incentives need to be supported by regulations, and that requires engaging local government.”

International and country-based civil society organisations can play a critical role in building the capacity of small enterprises and intermediaries by, for example, supporting market assessments and demand, business development and financial management skills, and by addressing gender inequalities. In partnering with four CSOs (Plan International Indonesia, SNV Vietnam, WaterAid Timor-Leste and the East Meets West Foundation (EMWF), the primary goal of ISF’s engagement was therefore to help these organisations to effectively support local entrepreneurs in their efforts to bring basic services and infrastructure to where they are most needed.

Phase 1 produced a raft of instructive publications, including CSO-focused learning briefs, policy briefs, working papers and research reports in addition to peer-reviewed journal papers and conference proceedings. The findings were presented at seven international conferences, including the prestigious Stockholm World Water Week 2017, as well as at seminars for DFAT (Australia and Indonesia), training sessions for practitioners, and national workshops with government counterparts in Indonesia, Vietnam and Timor-Leste.

The uptake and implementation of the learnings by CSOs and other players has been appreciative and enthusiastic. SNV Vietnam, for example, used the findings that remote communities need cheaper alternatives to the standard government-approved sanitation technologies in its subsequent work with World Bank across nine Vietnamese provinces. WaterAid Timor-Leste changed its approach from focusing solely on marketing only traditional heavy and breakable latrines to supporting entrepreneurs to trial low-cost, light-weight product designs for areas with poor roads and transport facilities. iDE, a participant in a CS WASH Fund Hanoi Learning Event, expressed that Enterprise in WASH had led it to engage with local government rather than focus solely on enterprises.

Promisingly, policy makers have also endorsed and adopted the research outcomes. This was apparent when Vietnam’s Vice Minister of Agricultural and Rural Development (MARD) firmly instructed the 300 representatives of provincial governments at a workshop in Hanoi to implement the recommendations. In 2020, two years after the completion of the joint research, project partner IWEM, as a government research institution, continues to guide the Vietnamese government on the basis of this research, focusing on costs, tariffs, investments and suitable arrangements for ongoing operation and maintenance of water schemes in northern highland provinces.

Success through viability, gender equality and associations

The second phase of Enterprise in WASH had three objectives. The first was to test the long-term viability of providing water service through private enterprise by examining the schemes’ cost structures in Vietnam. As the first of its kind globally, this study collected real cost data from 14 privately-managed water supply enterprises in rural Vietnam and found that financial literacy among all players – private enterprises, donors, CSOs and governments – with respect to capturing life-cycle costs to inform tariffs and subsidies was extremely poor and needed to improve. In addition, the research found that investment in capital maintenance, essential for securing on-going services, was too low.

Another objective, which involved six CSO partners, investigated gender equity and women’s empowerment in private enterprise development in Cambodia, Indonesia and Lao PDR. In Indonesia, the empirical research with partners Plan, SNV and Water.org was designed as a capacity-building exercise. Two partners from UGM University who had expertise in business but not gender led the process under the guidance and mentorship of ISF. The outcomes of this study now inform Plan Indonesia’s DFAT Water for Women engagement with social enterprises as well as a large-scale Dutch-funded program on gender-transformative WASH in eastern Indonesia.

The final focus of Phase 2 was the potential role that associations of community-based water organisations could play in providing economies of scale to support enterprise development and expand water service delivery models. In Cambodia, ISF led six partners (including the Cambodian Government, World Bank, NGOs and participant UNICEF) in an investigation into how business development could be supported at a country-wide scale. This highlighted that a lack of CSO project coordination leaves gaps in the sector’s efforts to support the development of sanitation enterprises. A subsequent recommendation highlighted the importance of CSOs stepping back from a project-focused approach to consider their roles in the wider system. Director of Aguaconsult, Harold Lockwood, called this significant adjustment in approach the "next wave" in private sector development at WASH Futures in 2018.

Research in Indonesia has since looked at associations in 10 districts to assess any limitations to their success. This model of water service delivery is still limited by a lack of intermediary-level support to help the community to manage the water supply post construction, and the findings are contributing to further evolving the associations model towards fulfilling its potential. The timing of this is critical: as the World Bank wraps up its long-term rural water supply and sanitation program (PAMSIMAS) in 2020, it places the future of support for these systems and association in the hands of local and national governments.  

Enterprise in WASH produced its own website, www.enterpriseinwash.info, which is home to all research outputs and continues to be a critical resource for the WASH sector. In 2019, the site received ~27000 downloads, while as of September 2020, there had been ~16000 downloads for that year. Professor Willetts recognises that comprehensively capturing the impacts of this five-year multi-pronged initiative is challenging:

"Our greatest achievement is perhaps the changed mind-set of the people in the organisations we worked with, including the civil society organisations, private enterprises, local governments and our funder, DFAT. Their collaboration now has a real chance of bringing WASH to the communities where it’s most needed."

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