Development Aspects Impressum Editors

Project design

With a growing awareness of the benefits of a regional approach among East Afri- can Community countries, the capacity development initiative emphasizes regional networking as a model to protect and manage Lake Victoria as a shared resource. Capacity development is considered an essential tool to increase the local “owner- ship” of environmental (drinking water, sanitation, solid waste) services. The ca- pacity development interventions were started after the infrastructure investment projects had been largely completed and aimed to develop and empower local stakeholders in order to secure their active interest and participation in the sustain- able and equitable delivery of the services.

1. The ownership concept

Increased local ownership of environmental services does not relate to the legal ownership of the provider or the assets, but rather to the insight among local stakeholders that sustainable services provision can only be realized if and when they assume responsibility for the services, in their roles of local facilitator/regula- tor, asset owner/operator, interest group or customer. In the LVWATSANI and in many other donor-inspired interventions for improved services provision, the well- intended local “ownership” is quite an issue as the new or improved assets are often considered to be initiated externally and, by implication, externally “owned”. This perceived foreign ownership implies that the local stakeholders are of the opinion that the care for the upkeep and operation of the assets should be under- taken by the same foreign “owner”. In an extreme case, the user of a rainwater harvesting tank with a broken tap in one of the project towns was waiting for a new tap to arrive from UN-HABITAT, meaning that the user was not assuming full responsibility for the upkeep of the asset. In another case, proposed investments in water abstraction capacity had been accepted by the “recipient”, a local service operator, but without the strong conviction that these investments were in fact the most needed ones considering the very poor state and low population coverage of the water distribution system. Here also, the perception of the concerned board members was that of foreign “ownership” of the project.

The notion of local ownership includes aspects of regulation, sustainable op- eration, and the use and benefits associated with the operation of the assets. It therefore involves local government and relevant supra-municipal agencies and bodies, the operator of the assets and the population in its many manifestations: as institutional, commercial or residential users of the services and as interest groups (e.g., as employees, youth, women, community-based organizations (CBOs), pri- vate entrepreneurs, NGOs). These parties each have to contribute and take respon-

sibility for decision making in the areas of services development and sustainable and beneficial operation and use of the assets. Among other challenges, it is the perception of local ownership and its implications in terms of the required capaci- ties to assume responsibility by the various target groups in the community that need to be addressed by capacity development.

2.