Water P-Notes
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These practitioner notes (P-Notes) are published by the Water Sector Board of the Sustainable Development Network of the World Bank Group. P-Notes are a synopsis of larger World Bank documents in the water sector.
Items in this collection
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Publication
Making the Most of Scarcity : Accountability for Better Water Management in the Middle East and North Africa
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2009-06)Most of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) cannot meet current water demand. Many countries face full-blown crises, and the situation is likely to get even worse. Estimates show that per capita water availability will be cut in half by 2050, with serious consequences for aquifers and natural hydrological systems. Demand for water supplies and irrigation services will change as economies grow and populations increase, with an attendant need to address industrial and urban pollution. Some 60 percent of the region's water flows across international borders, further complicating the resource management challenge. Rainfall patterns are predicted to shift as a result of climate change. The social, economic, and budgetary consequences of these challenges are enormous. The supply of drinking water could become more erratic, necessitating greater reliance on expensive desalination technologies, and increasing drought would require emergency supplies brought by tanker or barge. Service outages would put stress on expensive network and distribution infrastructure. Unreliable sources of irrigation water would depress farmer incomes, economic and physical dislocation would increase with the depletion of aquifers and unreliability of supplies, and local conflicts could intensify. All of this would have short- and long-term effects on economic growth and poverty, exacerbate social tensions within and between communities, and put increasing pressure on public budgets. -
Publication
Environmental Health and Child Survival
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2009-06)Interest in environmental health has increased in recent years, largely because the most vulnerable groups remain disproportionately exposed to and affected by health risks from environmental hazards. More than 40 percent of the global burden of disease attributed to environmental factors falls on children below five years of age, who account for about 10 percent of the world's population. Children are especially susceptible to environmental factors that put them at risk of developing illness early in life. Malnutrition is an important contributor to child mortality; malnutrition and environmental infections are inextricably linked, but these links have been forgotten or neglected by policy-makers. The World Health Organization (WHO) recently convened an expert panel, which concluded that about 50 percent of the consequences of malnutrition are in fact caused by inadequate water and sanitation provision and poor hygienic practices. Recent recognition of environmental linkages with malnutrition highlights the urgent need to develop a spectrum of interventions to reduce exposure to environmental risks. -
Publication
Post-Construction Support and Sustainability in Community-Managed Rural Water Supply
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2009-06)Water projects in developing countries are inaugurated with great fanfare by the governments, lenders, and sponsors that make them possible; the projects' results, however, don't always receive the publicity of groundbreaking ceremonies. This study reports the findings of a multi-country research project intended to discover how such rural water supply (RWS) systems actually perform. Its emphasis was on how performance was affected by post-construction support (PCS) to communities after project completion. Information was collected from households, village water committees (VWCs), focus groups of residents, system operators, and key informants in rural communities in Bolivia, Ghana, and Peru. Approximately 10,000 individuals registered their opinions. The great majority of the systems were found to be performing well; the factors influencing their sustainability should help policy makers, investors, and managers around the globe who plan rural water systems. -
Publication
Public-Private Partnerships to Reform Urban Water Utilities in Western and Central Africa
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2009-05)Western and Central Africa have lengthy experience with public-private partnerships (PPPs), both for water supply and for combined power and water supply utilities. Cote d'Ivoire's successful PPP dates from 1959, and, over the last two decades, as many as 15 out of 23 countries in the region have experimented with PPPs. Eleven PPPs are studied here, and detailed performance indicators are reported for six large cases-Cote d'Ivoire, Senegal, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Gabon. These PPPs all have had at least four years of private operation. Through its successes and failures, the Western and Central African experience offers interesting lessons for other developing countries on how to improve the quality of urban water supply services, increase the efficiency of operations, and establish the financial credibility of the sector. -
Publication
Addressing China’s Water Scarcity
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2009-05)China's water resources are scarce and unevenly distributed. It has the sixth largest amount of renewable resources in the world, but a per capita availability that is only one-fourth the world average and among the lowest for a major country. The country is under serious water stress, and its problems are made more severe by the fact that resources are unevenly distributed, both spatially and temporally. Per capita water availability in northern China is less than one-fourth that in southern China, one eleventh of the world average, and less than the threshold level that defines water scarcity. A monsoonal climate also means that China is subject to frequent droughts and floods, often simultaneously in different regions, as precipitation varies greatly from year to year and season to season. The complexity of water resource management in China requires a transition from a traditional system with the government as the main decision making entity toward a modern approach that relies on a sound legal framework, effective institutional arrangements, transparent decision making and information disclosure, and active public participation. This will require that laws are straightforward and not contradictory, with mechanisms and procedures for enforcing them. It also should entail the creation of a new multi-sectoral state agency tasked with overseeing water management policy at the national level. -
Publication
Guiding Principles for Successful Reforms of Urban Water Supply and Sanitation Sectors
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2009-04)The note proposes a methodology for assessing the accountability framework of an urban water supply and sanitation (WSS) sector that it defines as the set of actors, mandates, contractual arrangements between actors, and instruments used by actors to implement their mandates. The accountability framework focuses on the five key functions of the urban WSS sector that are policy formulation, asset management and infrastructure development, service provision, financing, and regulation of the service. The note recommends that particular attention be paid to incentives, either productive or counterproductive, that could influence the performance of the WSS service. It also suggests identifying vested interests likely to be affected by reforms, with a focus on those engaged in fraud and corruption, as they could actively lobby against reforms which, if successfully implemented, would affect their revenues. The note focuses primarily on the provision of official piped WSS service, but it also recognizes that when a central service provides limited coverage or poor performance it can forfeit its monopoly status, whereupon alternatives to the piped WSS service often play an important role. The note also stresses the need for identifying weak links of the accountability framework as they could encourage fraud or corruption. The note finally summarizes best practice for setting WSS tariff levels and structures and for designing subsidies that reach those who need them. -
Publication
Competition or Cooperation? A New Era for Agricultural Water Management
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2009-04)Reliable supplies of water for agriculture have helped meet rapidly rising demand for food in developing countries, making farms more profitable, reducing poverty, and helping vast regions of the world develop more dynamic and diversified economies. Can these successes be sustained with demand for food rising and water resources waning? That is the challenge now facing policy makers, planners, and practitioners in agricultural water management (AWM), as well as their allies in the World Bank and other development organizations. -
Publication
Securing Water for Agriculture : A Guide to Investment Decisions
(Washington, DC, 2009-04)How can the world grow more food, increase incomes, reduce poverty, and protect the environment with growing numbers of mouths to feed and increasingly constrained resources? A big part of the answer lies in better management of agricultural water. Agricultural water management (AWM) encompasses irrigation on both a large and small scale, drainage of irrigated and rain fed areas, watershed restoration, recycling of water, rainwater harvesting, and better in-field water management practices. There is considerable scope for improving returns on water from agricultural use. The key economic challenge is to set up an incentive framework that encourages efficient water use and profitable high value agriculture. Evidence indicates that such a framework improves efficiency and accountability, raises productivity, and promotes sustainable and environmentally responsible resource use. At the same time, irrigation schemes pose a financial challenge: to recover costs at a rate sufficient to finance services to farmers. The broad challenge is to encourage both large- and small-scale private investment. -
Publication
Handwashing Programs for Better Hygiene
(Washington, DC, 2009-04)The handwashing handbook advocates handwashing-with-soap programs to fight the spread of disease. It covers the following components: laying the foundation for a National Handwashing Program; understanding the consumer; and implementing the program. The handbook explains how to research consumer needs, communicate with target audiences, design appropriate and appealing messages, and implement a multi-channel promotional program. Handwashing with soap can dramatically reduce the leading causes of child mortality. The vast majority of child mortality occurs among the world's poorest populations in low and middle-income countries, with diarrhea and respiratory infections responsible for two out of three deaths. Handwashing with soap interrupts one of the main transmission routes of diarrhea, respiratory infections, skin infections and trachoma. Soap plays a key role in stopping transmission; just washing with water has little or no effect. Studies have shown that handwashing with soap can reduce diarrheas incidence by almost half and respiratory infections by a third. -
Publication
Monitoring and Evaluating Agricultural Water Management Projects : Better Tools for Better Results
(Washington, DC, 2009-04)Increasing agricultural production is necessary to feed growing populations, raise the incomes of poor farmers, and boost national export revenues. But in poor, water-scarce areas of the world, it is impossible to raise production without first finding ways to get more out of limited supplies of water, the ultimate scarce resource. Increasing the efficiency with which water is used is one of the chief goals of agricultural water management (AWM). Continual improvements in the efficiency of water use depend on close monitoring and careful evaluation. But despite the scale and scope of AWM projects around the world, and their criticality to global efforts to reduce rural poverty and increase food security, the monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of AWM projects need considerable improvement. The report stressed the need for greater emphasis on outcomes and impact measurement in project design. It also concluded that the effective implementation of projects was routinely compromised by inadequate supervision. M&E is strongest when there is a participatory quality to data collection and evaluation, so that stakeholders are invested in the project's successful implementation and aware of its successes and failures.