Rationale and concept of a Water Safety Plan
Rationale
The Millennium Development Goal referring to water supplies (Goal 7, Target 7C) stresses the need for sustainable access (quantity) to safe drinking water (quality). However, ensuring that safe water quality is maintained in community-based water supply projects is, in our experience, usually an ad hoc procedure, involving, on occasion, water quality testing events using field kits. In a few cases the water testing may form part of a regular water quality monitoring regime, but even when an established regime has been set up by an implementing agency, it often fails because of a lack of consumables for the kit, or breakdown of the incubator in the kit, or simply because the operator responsible is unable to visit the community in question as a result of events such as adverse weather conditions or security issues.
There are other reasons why reliance on field-testing of water quality is inadequate to ensure safe community water supplies:
- Even if a water quality monitoring regime is adhered to, the water quality results are, by nature, historic – they will only show what contamination has already entered the water supply and, most likely, has also been consumed.
- Physical water quality testing is usually directed at the water source, eg the water flowing from a handpump or the water stored in a reservoir. Often water testing is even limited to a single precommissioning test, with the assumption that the sealed well (for example) will be guaranteed to deliver safe water indefinitely once it is commissioned (with the occasional ad hoc water quality check). Rarely is water testing with field kits systematically used to test water quality along the entire supply route, from the source to the point of consumption. And it is often at the point of consumption, eg in the home, that water quality is further jeopardised – for example, by unsafe storage or the lack of handwashing practice at critical times.
- Communities, even those that have set up efficient Water Users Groups, do not have the resources to operate incubator-based bacteriological water-testing equipment, such as the DelAgua or Wagtech kits. To operate these kits correctly, a regular supply chain of consumables is required, as is a reliable electricity supply.
Tearfund and its partners believe that a community water supply should be owned and managed by the user community which takes responsibility for the safety and reliability of the supply. How then can communities be empowered to effectively safeguard their water quality? This is where Water Safety Plans (WSPs) apply. Launched by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in 2004, WSPs move away from sole reliance on end-product testing, towards a process of quality assurance and preventative risk assessment and management. WSPs help beneficiary communities and project implementing agencies to:
- identify sources of potential contamination (the hazard)
- develop methods to control the hazard
- monitor when the supply is in compliance
- verify the effectiveness of the whole system (ie from catchment right through to the point of water use or consumption).
Hence, a WSP can be termed ‘a comprehensive risk assessment and risk management approach to ensuring the safety of a drinking-water supply that encompasses all stages in water supply, from catchment to consumer’ (WHO, 2004 p48, Ref 1). The point of covering ‘all stages’ is fundamental to the principle of a WSP, since contamination can occur at any point: the WSP therefore not only helps prevent contamination of source waters, but it helps to prevent contamination during storage, distribution and handling. If the supply system involves treatment, such as filtration or disinfection, then the WSP will help prevent recontamination before the water reaches the consumer. For further information, see Godfrey, 2005 (Ref 2).
The purpose of this guide to implementing Water Safety Plans
Numerous publications now exist on the formation and use of WSPs, but most of these focus on larger scale projects run by private or public utilities, commercial enterprises and international NGOs. Tearfund’s particular interest is in how WSPs can be understood and established by user communities which are faced with self-managing a water supply project to gain sustainable access to safe water quality.
The purpose of these guidelines is therefore to assist Tearfund’s partners and Disaster Management Teams (DMTs) and other external agencies supporting the implementation of water supply projects, in facilitating their beneficiary communities to create their own WSPs.
The outcome of this guide should be twofold:
- All Tearfund DMTs and partners working in WASH are made aware of WSPs and their benefits.
- WSPs become integrated in all Tearfund’s WASH programmes and become the principle means by which every community-based water supply project is managed in order to safeguard water quality.
As shown in these guidelines, WSPs might be introduced as a stand-alone process, or through certain appropriate entry points which are either planned for the community or have already been implemented, such as PHAST hygiene sessions or disaster risk reduction training.
The guide is written chiefly for the use of a facilitator or facilitating body (eg the hygiene promoters or community mobilisers of a DMT or partner staff) to use in training community members, and in particular, the water project accountability group (eg Water Users Committee) of the community.
In order to achieve the objective of guiding the reader in how to facilitate a community’s decision to form its own WSP, the guide:
- introduces the concept of WSPs and describes the key components
- gives examples of facilitating each component
- provides two case studies of community-level formation and application of WSPs.
The two case studies come from actual examples of application by Tearfund’s DMT, and they are copied in this guide to enable groups facilitating WSPs to study and consider replication, given their prevailing context. Those using these guidelines to facilitate the formation of WSPs can therefore either use the basic stages outlined in the guide to elaborate their own WSP process or adapt one of the two case studies.
Both case studies follow the basic stages outlined in this guide, but the fundamental difference between them is that the Southern Sudan process is chiefly pictorial and is suited to a mainly non-literate community. The process used in Afghanistan, however, is specifically relevant for a literate community.
