Angola

Urban and peri-urban water and sanitation joint programme management
Access to drinking water, adequate sanitation and hygiene facilities (WASH) is still precarious in Angola as demonstrated by successive outbreaks of cholera. In peri-urban Luanda, people pay high prices for poor quality water from private vendors, as a great proportion of water standpoints, especially those managed by state-owned public utility, break down frequently or do not function; in many, suburban areas, water points simply do not exist. In Moxico province, most people, among whom there is a high number of displaced people taking water from rivers, thereby exposing families to health risks linked to contaminated water.

The water and sanitation governance programme aims to promote sustainable, equal and non-discriminatory access to sufficient, safe, physically accessible and affordable drinking water, sanitation and hygiene for peri-urban and rural communities in the Luanda and Moxico provinces of Angola, by enhancing the governance of the sector and promoting a rights-based approach to water and sanitation delivery.

More precisely, the programme addresses the issue of un-sustainability of centrally-managed WASH facilities in poor neighbourhoods, by introducing community ownership and management of Water and Sanitation schemes.

The model of governance proposed in this project entails promoting a network of autonomous units of small and medium scale water and sanitation (WatSan) utilities owned and managed by communities in the target peri-urban and rural areas of the programme, with the local government at the ‘centre’ (of the network) confining its role to monitoring the network, regulating the rural water and sanitation market, pushing for the autonomy of communities in the management of their water and sanitation schemes, and intervening only when a major problem occurs in any one of the units or when a specific need is expressed (for example, the need for funding to upgrade a water post installation or the enforcement of the applicable pricing system).

The project is funded by the MDG Achievement Fund of the United Nations. The WGF is supporting UNDP Angola by carrying out the programme baseline study, and independent monitoring and evaluation of the programme’s performance.