David Weaver, senior advisor for Global Advocacy at the Church World Service in the United States shares about the Mwingi Water for All Project, and how it is attempting to contribute to water justice. He was participating in a Global Forum of the Ecumenical Water Network (EWN) of the World Council of Churches (WCC), which took place recently in Nairobi, Kenya.
Weaver was interviewed by Fredrick Nzwili, a journalist from Kenya.
Can you briefly outline the work you are doing in the area of water and sanitation in your country or elsewhere?The Mwingi Water for All Project is a Church World Service partnership project and it’s a classic example of adapting, finding locally appropriate, easily managed projects that can improve access to water for local communities.
I think the key thing that was identified in the visit [by Global Forum participants] to Mwingi is the importance of mobilisation, organisation and ownership.
In fact, a lot of the work that we do around in partnership to create water projects in Africa or Latin America or Asia or elsewhere, is precisely the community mobilisation and organisation.
We recognise that as absolutely critical and without that sort of community arc – both ownership and management – the projects themselves will not be sustainable.
What would you say are the key lessons from your work on water issues?
I mean, anyone in the development field who is honest will look around the world and say, since the age of development started in the post World War II period, there is plenty of projects that were initiated, that were discovered to be unsustainable. So the best way to create a sustainable project is one that has community ownership and where the community is accountable itself, but also does it in a way, and with the kind of materials and resources that the community itself can mobilise and maintain.
Bringing in inputs that require constant re-supply from outside, especially if they are beyond the economic means of the community at that stage, probably means that the project will not be sustainable.
In other places we’ll do household projects. One of these highlighted by the EWN when we did the testimony before the United Nations Human Rights Council was a programme in Cambodia which is focused on households.
Cambodia does not suffer from water scarcity. They have an abundance of water but what they do have a problem with is water quality. That’s both from pollutants either agricultural or industrial but also simply things like water borne pathogens and other things that contaminate water.
So we devised a very simple sand and gravel filtration system that can be built from local materials at extremely low costs for each household. These have been extremely successful at filtering the water and removing a lot of pathogens and parasites.
It’s that kind of adapting your interventions to the community at a stage at which they themselves can sustain and over which they have ownership. It’s a critical first sustainable development around water.
How is your organisation benefiting from being part of the ecumenical water network?
The ecumenical water network has two focuses; one is on mobilisation and advocacy around the human right to water and sanitation. The second has been the exchange of good practices among people who are actually implementers of water projects.
So we took some of our staff from our Cambodia project to the regional meeting in Asia; they were able to meet with other people from the Asian context, share information about what works and what doesn’t work, what produces sustainable intervention and what doesn’t produce sustainable intervention and how to work in various contexts.
One of the things about water, like anything else, is that you really do need to pay close attention to the specifics, even things like social and cultural factors, in the way the community has developed and used it’s resources.
For instance, we noted how women are the principal organisers of the water systems in the African village context. That’s because women have always taken responsibility for the provision of water for household use, even when it means walking five hours a day back and forth to the nearest water source.
It was a woman’s responsibility so women themselves had in a sense of social and cultural background, a kind of context within which they would be the ones to take responsibility for organising themselves to provide water for the community.
You need to be sensitive to those kinds of social and cultural facts wherever you’re working in the development field.
