Water & Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP) is a tri-sector partnership between the private sector, civil society and academia focused on addressing the increasing global problem of inadequate access to water and sanitation for the urban poor and the attainment of the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets, particularly those relating to water and sanitation.
WSUP’s mission is to improve the lives of the urban poor in developing countries by strengthening the capacity of local service providers and others to provide sustainable water and sanitation services, promote good hygiene and raise the health and environmental standards of the community.
What WSUP Does
At the heart of WSUP’s approach is its strong emphasis on working with service providers and strengthening their capacity to deliver services to the urban poor.
WSUP-supported projects work with the low income communities to ensure service levels are adequate, affordable and reflect the needs and demands of the community as well as ensuring that their responsibilities as good consumers are met.
In addition, WSUP works with both the service providers and the community to open dialogue between them.
There are great benefits in this partnership approach for all stakeholders: consumers, local service providers, local NGOs, donors and the private sector. The most important stakeholders - the urban poor - gain access to lasting water and sanitation services and actively participate throughout the project.
How WSUP Works
WSUP works to support the adoption and replication of effective, sustainable and scalable models of pro-poor urban water and sanitation services by service providers and/or national governments.
To achieve this, WSUP empowers service providers to demonstrate effective models in order to mobilise investments for further improvements and promotes successful approaches internationally.
This is achieved by building long term partnerships with service providers to plan, design and deliver urban water and sanitation programmes which contribute to achieving universal service coverage, are sustainable and can be scaled up across cities and towns.
These partnerships are framed by performance based contracts between WSUP and the service provider partner which outline joint resource commitments to deliver a joint programme.
WSUP has called these contracts Professional Service Agreements and they have been replicated across all of the programmes to date.
Where WSUP Works
WSUP supported programmes are under implementation in Bangladesh, India, Kenya (Nairobi and Naivasha), Madagascar, Mozambique and Zambia. Further programmes are under development in Ghana and Mali.
Achievements
To date, the nine projects have achieved:
