Came across a rather revealing new (Sept 28, 2012) report from the EU Court of Auditors that is rather critical about the EU development assistance in Sub-Saharan Africa in water and sanitation projects. The Special Report No 13/2012 “European Union Development Assistance for Drinking-Water Supply and Basic Sanitation in Sub-Saharan Countries”
eca.europa.eu/portal/pls/portal/docs/1/16800740.PDF covers the period from 2001 to 2010 and over 1 billion Euros in contracts. The report only examines 6 of the >50 countries that have received assistance. But still the message is clear.

The press release “Water and sanitation projects in sub-Saharan Africa - EU Commission could and should do better” - EU Auditors is exceptionally critical. eca.europa.eu/portal/pls/portal/docs/1/16786739.PDF

The principles findings are nothing new to many of us. But assembled in this fashion, the sector is seen as highly dysfunctional and has a lot of homework to do. The principles of sustainable sanitation are missing in these projects and are badly badly needed. Nothing less than a revamp in how these projects are executed by the EU is called for.

Reports findings:
Overall, equipment was installed as planned and was in working order.
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However, fewer than half of the projects examined delivered results meeting the beneficiaries’ needs.
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Overall the projects examined promoted the use of standard technology and locally available materials: they were sustainable in technical terms.
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For a majority of projects, results and benefits will not continue to flow in the medium and long term unless non-tariff revenue is ensured; or because of institutional weaknesses (weak capacity by operators to run the equipment installed).
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The Commission’s project management procedures cover sustainability comprehensively but the Commission did not make good use of those procedures to increase the likelihood that projects will bring lasting benefits.

Arno Rosemarin
Stockholm Environment Institute

Thx, Arno! Interesting material.

I wonder what kind of effects the audit results will have on future projects?

Dear Arno,

Thanks for bringing this report to our attention! I think it makes for very interesting reading and I am very pleased that it has been made publicly available (even via a press release). It is also interesting that they have added in the Appendix a reply by the Commission on the report findings by the Court of Auditors.

Here is a statement from the report which I liked (page 43):



Also useful is ANNEX IV on ASSESSMENT OF THE PROJECTS AUDITED which uses colour coding to give a form of good/bad/OK rating on different aspects.

And here another interesting quote from page 26 about the timing of "final reports" - the later the better!


What I am missing (and this also interests me as a European tax payer!) is:
(1)
How much did it cost to reach one person (Euros spent per person)?

(2)
Did we really reach the poorest quintile, including people with disabilities? Page 21 says about this:


(3)
And I also wonder how do the EU-funded projects interact with those projects funded by individual European states, e.g. Germany, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, UK, France... And: is there any advantage/disadvantage in doing development cooperation via individual European countries or via the EU? Would the aim be to ultimately bundle all the country's development cooperation programs together and only do it under one unified EU system?

(4)
How do the findings of this report compare to other EU programs in other sectors? Are the problems the same or are they specific to our sector?

Finally, one small example where EU money seems to have interfered with a common-sense solution (I don't know if this was just an isolated case or if this happens more regularly). In the Namibian town of Omaruru, a pilot project with Otji toilets (these work like urine-diverting dry toilets) showed promising results and very good acceptance by the users. But the municipality of Omaruru didn't want to scale up these Otji toilets mainly because they were expecting to a get a grant from the EU soon to get a flush toilet, sewer and wastewater treatment system (even though this system would most likely be unaffordable to run in the longer term; this issue of lacking financial sustainability is also mentioned in the Auditor's report mentioned above). You can read more about this case in this paper which I helped edit for the recent Dry Toilet Conference (and there is also a SuSanA case study about it):

Ingle, R., Berdau, S., Kleemann, F., Arndt, P. (2012). What does it take to convince decision makers in Omaruru, Namibia to scale up urine diversion dehydration “Otji toilets”?. 4th International Dry Toilet Conference, Tampere, Finland.
www.susana.org/lang-en/library?view=ccbk...p;type=2&id=1608

Regards,
Elisabeth