THE MVULA TRUST - DEVELOPING SUCCESS AND SUSTAINABILITY IN SOUTH AFRICA

PRESENTATION BY

MRS. REJOICE MABUDAFHASI, MP
CHAIRPERSON, THE MVULA TRUST
SOUTH AFRICA

Ministers, dignitaries and fellow colleagues of the global water and sanitation sector,

I want to tell you about a story. About a success story taking place in South Africa, called the Mvula Trust.

The Mvula Trust, a non-governmental organisation committed to the goals of the South African government's Reconstruction and Development Programme, was established in 1993 against a backdrop of political and social uncertainty. It was established in a country which had historically denied its citizens the most basic of human rights including, for many, the right to clean and safe water supplies.

With 12 million South Africans lacking access to potable water and a further 21 million without access to adequate sanitation facilities, the need for a dynamic and innovative approach to community water and sanitation services was acute.

With certain key policies in place and funding secured from a family of stable and encouraging donors, the Mvula Trust began its mission as a grant-finance institute to provide financial and other support to poor and disadvantaged South African communities lacking access to water and sanitation services. Today, four years later, with much learned and many policies adapted according to the realities of the South African environment, the Trust has successfully supported 120 completed projects and committed funds to a further 180 - benefiting some 1 million South Africans in total.

So what are the key practices and policies - at the core of the Mvula Trust - that have brought about delivery of this scale in such a short time period?

It is important to explain that, in the South African context, the word disadvantaged refers to communities who have previously not had adequate support for infrastructure development. It is these communities that are the target beneficiaries of the Mvula Trust.

Due to the extreme economic inequities found in South Africa, many of these communities are found in the country's rural and peri-urban areas. If approached by such a community, the Trust will seek to provide financial support based on the community's economic status; its contribution towards costs; the financial status of local service institutions that will be responsible for the physical implementation of the project; and, the level and type of service required.

The Trust aims to extend the range of water and sanitation supply options available to users in South Africa and, to this end, grant ceilings (in the form of per capita subsidies) are offered according to the size of the community implementing the project.

Perhaps of paramount importance to the Trust's work is its commitment to demand-responsive development. The theory has become reality through the treatment of communities as clients with rights and responsibilities. The communities' willingness to accept these responsibilities is a key factor to success, and is demonstrated through financial contributions; making key decisions regarding project design and technology options; managing project funds; and, paying for the services once the project is operational.

Behind the demand-responsive approach of the Trust lies a comprehensive and inclusive capacity building and training programme. Without a doubt, the Trust's most successful schemes are those where not only effective capacity building and training have been carried out but, more importantly, where community elected Water Committees are, through effective and sensitive workshopping, effectively brought into the decision-making process from the start of a project. Greater emphasis is today placed on such capacity building initiatives than on formal skills training.

To ensure genuine commitment from the benefiting communities, the Trust requires a meaningful capital contribution to be made. This places ownership of the project within the community, ensures community leadership has widespread support; contributes towards resource mobilisation for infrastructural development; and, promotes the dignity of the beneficiaries.

During the first three years of its existence, the Mvula Trust set this community contribution at eight per cent of the overall project cost, excluding pre-project work and training. This cost was mostly paid through subsidised labour rates and cash. However, due to simultaneous free government water services being implemented in the country and the perception that labour was, in itself, not a contribution, the Trust restructured the policy. Today the contribution remains, but it is a wholly cash one and is used as an "emergency fund" for unexpected and expensive damages occurring after project completion.

While the Mvula Trust believes that its demand-responsive approach ensures, as far as possible, the willingness of communities to pay for their water, an area where its experience has forced a change of thinking, has been the issue of levels of service. Originally adopting the South African government's stipulated policy of providing communal standposts within 200 metres of every household, the Trust now encourages the implementation of private household connections and actively assists communities to achieve this. To this end, the Trust has established a loan finance facility for individual households to gain the necessary finance needed to implement private connections. This finance facility is also made available to local entrepreneurs wishing to enter the market in services of water and/or sanitation provision for poor communities at any stage of the project cycle.

However, all of what I have spoken about would be without worth of the projects implemented were not sustainable. For sustainability is the benchmark of development success. A project built today must benefit tomorrow's children.

During its first years of operation, the Mvula Trust's approach to post project support or "mentoring" was that any external support would undermine efforts to encourage local responsibility, and would perpetuate an unwanted dependency. However, experience and an external evaluation of the Trust, carried out in 1996, have shown that it is unrealistic to expect that over the relatively short period of time that a development agency engages with a community to implement a water project, sufficient capacity can be developed to enable communities to manage their schemes with no external support at all.

Who then acts as this long-term external support mechanism?

We in South Africa have hope, for the emergence of rural local government following Local Government Elections in 1995/6 has introduced a potentially sustainable external support agency which did not exist when the Mvula Trust started. The Trust is now developing realistic and sustainable models of co-operation between village water committees and these newly-elected local government structures. A new Water Service Act has provided a legal framework for community/local government partnerships in terms of which village water committees are formally appointed as Water Service Providers by the relevant local government body which, in turn, has the responsibility of a Water Service Authority.

The key to the success of this new approach , the Trust believes, is to strike a realistic balance between the respective capacities of water committees and local government. The former, in most cases, cannot manage entirely on their own, but neither can most rural local government structures, even at district level. In such situations, a modest yet real role for local government must be promoted, involving monitoring, advice and assistance in accessing support, rather than trying to manage schemes by establishing unaffordable and unsustainable bureaucracies.

The Mvula Trust has proven that, in South Africa, community managed water and sanitation services can, and do, work. With assistance and support from government structures, at both national and local level, the approaches adopted by the Trust will continue to be nurtured and grow as they have over the past four years.

I thank you for the opportunity to share our experiences with you.