Making good on our promises: clean water for a healthy world

“Clean Water for a Healthy World” was the theme of World Water Day 2010. How to provide sustainable water services when the guarantee on the pump runs out. The life-cycle of a system encompasses the need for repairs, replacements, expansion and changes. It is a sort of life-long care that leads to healthy services and healthy people.

Watch WASHCost Director Catarina Fonseca talk about the importance of life-cycle costs and focusing on people rather than infrastructure in order to sustain the services that people expect.

Watch the video and click through the drawings below:

Transcript of Catarina Fonseca (CF), WASHCost Director, interviewed by Nicolas Dickinson (ND)

ND: It's World Water Day today. I'd like to ask you, what is the relevance of life-cycle costs to everybody else on World Water Day?

CF: When we promise services to people, they expect it to be forever, we expect it to be forever. But what's happening at the moment? That’s not reality. At the moment, in Africa, you have 50% of water infrastructure not working. You have hand pumps that last maximum three years instead of 20 [years]. You have latrines which are converted into washing houses or to store grain and this is a lot of aid money, which is going into infrastructure that is not working after a while. With WASHCost and with Life-Cycle Costs we are trying to look beyond the technologies and looking at the services that those technologies provide.

ND: So what is unique about that approach?

CF: What's different is the focus on people, on the services that they receive, not so much on the technologies that they have available but... what are the costs of making water more accessible to the households, or that it is closer, or of better quality and quantity. How much does it cost to go from one service to another. If governments and other organisations have those costs, perhaps they can make better investments and apply their money in a more cost-effective manner.

ND: On World Water Day, do you have any personal plans?

CF: I've been thinking about it for the last week. Today I am going to really try to explain to my family and my friends what WASHCost is about, what my work is and why do I think it is important.

ND: Thank you Catarina, I hope that afterwards we'll hear some more from you and what more insights you have made in the process.