Event Description
This seminar will present ongoing initiatives to address the economics of sanitation and water and discuss current thinking on the costing of sanitation services. WHO/University of Geneva will present cost-benefit analyses of improved sanitation options for low-income communities. WASHCost focuses on cost identification and disaggregation over the entire WASH service delivery cycle, will present two cases from Ghana and Andhra Pradesh, India. EAWAG will present a costing tool for sanitation technologies, ranging from simple pits to constructed wetlands. WSP will present the findings of a financial and economic analysis of ecological sanitation in Sub-Saharan Africa, which compares the cost of EcoSan with conventional sanitation systems as part of WSP’s broader Economics of Sanitation Initiative. The second part of the seminar will involve a panel discussion that will provide insight and recommendations on how to move forward.

The target audience of the seminar is international donors, national governments, local level practitioners and NGOs.

Programme

Chair: Dr. Robert Bos, Coordinator Water, Sanitation and Health, WHO, Switzerland
Panel Moderator: Ms. Rachel Cardone, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, USA

Event Summary and Conclusions
The conclusion from the diverse studies presented in the Water and Sanitation Economics Seminar highlighted the difficulty of accessing cost information. However, cost information is key to the advocacy of sustainable water and sanitation (WASH) services. According to Clarissa Brocklehurst, Head of Water, Environment and Sanitation Section, UNICEF is starting to look into the full life-cycle cost in order to justify investments as other sectors do (health and education).

There is still much discussion on the methodologies on how to measure benefits in the water sector. Numbers are so context specific that it is critical to adapt methodologies at country level and for local needs. For example, a hand pump can be three times more costly within the same district or between Asia and Africa. Materials used in construction, hydro-geological conditions or aspects such as labour availability are all factors which influence costs.

The real value of cost-benefit information lays in the harmonisation of methodologies to assess the life-cycle costs of WASH service delivery. A government official of the Ministry of Water and Environment of Uganda, Aaron Kabirizi, gave an example: “We need to know if we should invest in new infrastructure or if we should rehabilitate what is already there.” Concerning benefits, he mentioned, “Our budget for the water sector just decreased. With cost-benefit analysis we will be able to argue better for increased funds.”

What seems to be critical is the re-packaging of the information, both for the use of practitioners and for advocacy purposes. When questioned by the audience about the spending of large amount of aid on hand pumps that only last a couple of years, Peter Feldman from PLAN International said ‘that life-cycle unit costs are a way of incorporating accountability into this business.’