Cambodia has a good legal and institutional foundation for developing good governance in the WASH sector at the sub-national levels, based on national policies and strategies. This sets the direction to improve the quality of service delivery at the provincial, district and commune levels. However, implementation has been far from effective particularly at sub-national levels.<?xml:namespace>
In Cambodia, decentralization and deconcentration (D D) reforms have taken place with the aim of strengthening and expanding local democracy as well as promoting local development and reducing poverty in line with the objectives of the CMDGs. The D D initiatives have been mainstreamed by the Royal Government of Cambodia (RGC) into the reform process for effective and equitable delivery of basic services to attain the CMDGs. The objective of the CMDGs is to alleviate poverty and enhance opportunities and capacity for development and safe delivery of WASH services is central to the task of poverty alleviation as well as focusing on the well-being of women and children. Various donors have designed projects to empower sub-national governments, since the post-conflict time, including the Seila Programme (Decentralization and De-concentration Programme). Although there has been some progress in the decentralisation and de-concentration reforms, still a lot of work needs to be done, and the WASH sector is no exception.
Currently the capacity and understanding of WASH related issues and management are quite limited. In addition, there are limited resources of inadequate quality to manage WASH initiatives at sub-national levels. The importance of decentralisation and deconcentration reforms is to bring decision-making down to the level where there is specific knowledge about the problems so as to make the management process more effective and efficient. In particular the ownership of the WASH sector needs to be increasingly managed by sub-national governments because sustainability of WASH initiatives could only be sustained by increasing the capacity and ownership of the local governments.
One of the impediments for such reforms is centralised management of the WASH sector, where most management decisions are taken at the national level. For example, for important issues concerning policy, implementation, service provision and regulation are managed by Department of Potable Water Supply (DPWS) at the national level, while Provincial Department of Potable Water Supply (PDPWs) plays a limited supervising role over water utilities. PDPWs are thus accountable to both the Provincial Governor and MIME
Another problem is weak inter-sectoral coordination and collaboration. This weak coordination is an impediment to unify efforts for concerted activities at the sub-national level of the WASH sector despite the existence of many inter-ministerial and inter-agency structures. While significant investments have been made in capacity building regarding the WASH sector for decades, what are missing are coordinated implementation and collective knowledge of the results of the interventions. For example, in Cambodia there exists two parallel technical working groups (TWG) on WASH: one for urban WASH (chaired by MIME) and the other for rural WASH (chaired by MRD). The urban-rural divide thus is never bridged, and more importantly peri-urban areas and emerging towns where significant portions of the population reside fall through this crack.
The proposed project intends to generate a framework to overcome the ineffectiveness in the WASH sector at sub-national levels by enhancing coordination and augmenting decision-making at the sub-national levels through the development of a governance guide and related capacity building efforts.
The WASH Governance Guide aims to empower sub-national levels to better manage the WASH sector. The strengthened sub-national governments will contribute to the nationally initiated decentralisation and deconcentration reforms process.
Such a focus on capacity building at sub-national level is also in line with the agreement by various stakeholders in consultation meetings during the scoping mission as it builds a sound basis for deconcentration, and at a later stage, decentralisation, which are intended to result in the scaling up of rural and urban WASH.
The proposed project will build upon the existing UN-Habitat Water for Asian Cities (WAC) Programme and the Mekong Region Water and Sanitation Initiative (MEK-WATSAN) in which on-the-ground pilot and demonstration water and sanitation projects are focusing on pro-poor water supply and sanitation delivery. The project will particularly focus on further improving capacity by conducting an assessment of the gaps and needs in the WASH sector at sub-national levels, preparing a national Guide and piloting projects according to the Guide.
