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Get development professionals together and soon enough the conversation will turn to the 'aid v empowerment' debate. Here in Stockholm, at one of the largest gatherings of the water community, the argument goes something like this: the needs in the developing world are so great (close to 2 billion people drink water with faeces in it), the infrastructure so poor, the delivery and fundraising models so antiquated that the most appropriate thing for an NGO to do is hand out tools: a water pump, a school lavatory, a desalination filter.
But a year later the pump is broken, the sheltered toilet stands disused - or even used as a grain store - the filter is no longer effective. The implementing organisation has moved on, leaving the community right back where it started. So a new NGO moves in and starts the process over. "In the end, the biggest problem in communities becomes not the lack of water but the multiplicity of systems that exist in one country - all of them broken down," says Jenda Terpstra, a communications consultant at IRC.
The alternative, as Terpstra's employers would argue, is a role for NGOs as supporters of government reform and not as givers of charity. That's something that all parts of the water community are likely to agree with, but a look at where resources go shows that what the sector practices is different to what it preaches.
"There's a dichotomy between what we think and what we do," says Patrick Moriarty, CEO at IRC. The Dutch-based "think and do tank" champions "delivering good water, sanitation and hygiene services not just to a few people for a while but to everyone forever".
And Moriarty insists that achieving that means one thing: working with government. "The private sector is good but needs to be regulated," he says. Likewise, "cool new social enterprises are great but they are never going to scale. We need to radically rethink sustainable service delivery".
So why isn't this logic changing the rules of the game in water, sanitation and hygiene (wash)?
Again, it's the same answer that is at the heart of many a development challenge: funding mechanisms. Moriarty concedes that though IRC is trying to lead by example ("we are a €10m organisation with 100 staff and don't deliver a single project") it is sometimes difficult to convince donors of the virtues of this approach.
"It takes courage for donors to ignore 30 years of bad experiences with governments and work with them again. Taxpayers in donor countries are suffering from aid fatigue so insisting on payment for results is good, but pay for the right results ... So you've given one million people access to drinking water but will they still have it after two years?"
There are several reasons why, though the above sounds intuitive, donors have been slow on the uptake. It will increase the costs of monitoring and evaluation as projects will have to be assessed over a period of possibly ten years. The duration of these projects mean that getting political buy-in will be more challenging as the electoral cycle is, at best, half that duration and ministers risk having fewer outcomes to show for money invested. All this talk about supporting sustainable services at scale leads to other questions about who owns the process and who pay for it. There are other issues with the approach, but Moriarty argues that facing those arguments head on is worth it. "It's all about getting local government fired up and breaking through development mumbo jumbo."
Do you agree? Would wash projects be more effective if NGOs did less direct implementation and offered more support to government reform? Perhaps more contentiously, as the obsession with aid effectiveness and value for money continues, what would be a better use of donor funding: financing hardware or national systems and services?
Take our poll and leave your thoughts in the comment thread below.
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