Background and definition

What is the Concerted Municipal Strategies program?

Between the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the years 2000, pS-Eau and the Municipal Development Partnership (MDP) conducted action-research programs on water and sanitation service management. This work clearly highlighted the key role played by local authorities in the development of water and sanitation services and the need to involve all actors when formulating a municipal strategy to improve these services.

In accordance with national policies and strategies, the responsibility for implementing water and sanitation services most often falls to local authorities. It was thus necessary to build the capacities of these municipalities to enable them to undertake both their contracting authority role (particularly with regard to planning) and the technical supervision of local actors.

To this end, in 2007, following a preliminary phase financed by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, pS-Eau and MDP initiated a tri-annual program funded by the ACP-EU Water Facility and French Development Agency: the ‘Concerted Municipal Strategies – Water and Sanitation For All' (CMS) program.

The CMS program has thus both supplemented and put into practice the results of the two previous programs; the aim being to significantly increase access to drinking water and sanitation in towns in ACP countries, specifically focusing on local contracting authority skills and capacity-building. The CMS program consisted of four components:

1. Concerted municipal strategies and action plans for large towns in Africa. This component focused on developing a methodology to support large towns in Africa (of between 50,000 and 300,000 inhabitants) to establish overall intervention strategies for water and sanitation services. This methodology was then streamlined during the implementation of pilot strategies in 15 large towns in Central, West and East Africa.

2. Regional strategies to support small towns. In this component, an approach was piloted at regional level in three countries specifically aimed at meeting the needs of small towns of between 3,000 and 30,000 inhabitants by exploring synergies and the effects of scale.
Three angles of approach were selected: the reinforcement of financial capacities to improve water and sanitation services; the reinforcement of back-up support to actors in small towns; the reinforcement of local service management and contracting authority capacities.
The first two of these share similar methodological principles:
- a consultation approach that centers around the local authority;
- a sector diagnostic that focuses on both the equipment and the actors and determines their expect­ations;
- a consultation process aimed at defining shared objectives;
- an action plan, aimed at galvanizing local and external efforts and that defines the priorities for action.

3. The production and dissemination of methodological guides. A series of six methodological guides were developed to meet the needs and expectations of municipal-level decision-makers and pract­itioners in Africa.

4. Training needs assessment of the new water and sanitation professions. As part of this component, work was undertaken to precisely assess the training needs of around 20 strategic water and sanitation sector professions. By cross-checking the information obtained against the training available, recommendations were also put forward for improving the current training offer.
The methodologies were further developed and streamlined through the piloting of this approach in selected towns and regions in Africa. It is now necessary to ensure that these practices and guides are extensively shared with all those to whom they may be of use.

©Lettre du pS-Eau 71 de Dec 2012