Post-tsunami work in Pakistan has included clean water provision. Picture: Caroline Irby/Tearfund
Tearfund, as part of End Water Poverty, is calling for a Global Framework for Action.
We believe this is essential in order to ensure greater focus and coordination of efforts, to confer authority on the key stakeholders who need to act, and to increase the accountability of actors at national and international levels.
Without these building blocks, sanitation and water will continue to lag behind other issues.
This framework must include:
• An annual review of the sector
• A high level annual meeting
• The development of costed and coordinated national water and sanitation plans
• A commitment that no credible plan should fail for lack of finance
Annual review
An annual review which would look at the volume of aid being spent on the issue, progress towards the Millennium Development Goals and the effectiveness of donor support.
It would also provide analysis of developing countries’ own levels of investment in sanitation and water.
The review would identify key challenges that need to be overcome to address the current crisis. It would look at both donor and recipient performance and identify gaps in funding.
High-level meeting
A high-level meeting on sanitation and water should take place once a year.
The meeting would be attended by government ministers and officials from the largest bilateral and multi-lateral donor agencies and by representatives from the most off-track regions (Africa and South Asia).
The purpose of the meeting would be to review and assess global progress, drawing on analysis presented in the annual review. The meeting would identify specific issues affecting off-track countries and financial gaps that require action.
No credible national plan chould fail for lack of finance
For the sector to make progress, developing country governments must strengthen national frameworks to plan, coordinate and monitor the delivery of services.
A credible plan would address key constraints to meeting the MDGs. It would provide:
- Realistic annual coverage targets with timelines and benchmarks against which to measure progress on key policies and outcomes
- Costed and separate strategies for accelerating progress towards the MDG targets for water supply and sanitation
- Indications as to how the plan will be monitored and evaluated
The high-level meeting would also be responsible for identifying credible plans which have failed to mobilise the required finance from external sources, and decide collectively to realign donor support in order to fill gaps which have arisen due to poor coordination at the global level.