Self-supply is increasingly touted as a route to reach SDG 6. It can be a clear demonstration of community and individual agency, autonomy and self-reliance. Self-supply is, however, often the result of communities stepping into fill gaps in public services, with concomitant equality and sustainability impacts and implications.
Self-supply in no way exempts states of their obligations to progressively realise the human rights to water, health, and food. It can only be a successful model if it is actively supported by governments - financially, technically, legally, and institutionally.
A post by Alana Potter (Equality Collective), Rebecca Sands (WIN), and Barbara van Koppen (IWMI), Part of the Water Integrity Global Outlook: Finance series.
Self-supply: What and why?
Self-supply is a term used when individuals or groups independently develop, operate, and/or maintain their own water or sanitation systems. Individuals and groups can self-supply for domestic or productive uses, on a large or a small scale, for part or all of water-related infrastructure from source to use. The practice of self-supply has occurred for many years, both with and without government support. It has declined in some countries - and some areas within countries - and increased in others.
This blog post focuses on self-supply that exists as a de facto response to unreliable or absent public services, prevalent in both rural and urban, low- and middle-income groups.
Self-supply can be promoted as a sustainable, community-led solution, particularly in hard-to-reach areas. It is often an expression of self-sufficiency and can be seen as a resistance to dependency on unreliable state provision or corrupt systems.
However, it most often reflects a failure of governments to adequately invest in water services delivery. Self-supply may also be the result of weak or corrupt governance contributing to a failure to deliver water services.
Inadequate investment disproportionately affects marginalised groups, who are left with no choice but to develop and manage their own systems. It can be a costly burden, especially for women and the poorest households. It can result in reliance on contaminated or untested water sources, and it may impact water availability. When water sources dwindle during droughts, powerful parties may take more than their fair share of water, depriving smallholders and pastoralists of water for livestock, irrigation and domestic uses.
Self-supply and human rights
The human rights to water and sanitation entitle everyone to sufficient, safe, acceptable, physically accessible and affordable water for personal and domestic uses, and to physical and affordable access to sanitation in all spheres of life which is safe, hygienic, secure, socially and culturally acceptable, and which provides privacy and dignity. Yet, 2.2 billion people do not have access to safe water, while 3.4 billion people still do not have access to safe sanitation.
Under international human rights law, states are required to respect, protect, and fulfil people's rights, including the right to water and sanitation. There is progress towards universal access to water and sanitation, but the pace in low-income countries would need to be multiplied twenty-fold to deliver safe clean water, sanitation, and hygiene for all by 2030.
There is also much progress to be made to protect self-supply for productive uses that contribute to meeting the right to food. Mechanisms to protect small-scale water users from more powerful upstream users or users sharing the same aquifer, are underdeveloped. Yet, the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights to water and sanitation also recommends clearly that “water for life should be given the highest priority” over other water uses.
Self-supply for personal or productive use fills the gaps where progress is inadequate.
Benefits of self-supply
Self-supply can be a powerful demonstration of community agency. It represents the tenacity of people and groups who are not ordinarily provided with water and who often work and live informally or in areas where regulatory oversight is limited or absent.
Because self-supply solutions are primarily implemented by communities themselves, they are likely to be locally appropriate and cost efficient. These solutions can also improve resilience and flexibility. They can aid communities to manage water for various uses, including household drinking water, other domestic uses, water for food production and livestock, or other small-scale enterprise uses.
In a context where political vagaries render government support unreliable, leveraging local resources, knowledge, and investments by households can improve the longevity of infrastructure. Self-supply can also meet aspirations for higher levels of service than those included in minimum service level parameters, which do not always meet the human rights’ standards of accessibility, affordability or acceptability.
Drawbacks of self-supply
Equality issues:
Self-supply is not just the result of inequality, but also a root cause of widening inequalities, especially among marginalised groups who cannot afford to invest in their own systems or where decision-making is dominated by powerful or influential individuals/groups within or outside a community.
The need to self-supply, without government support, places immense pressure on communities. It can make their access to essential services discretionary and reliant on systems of patronage and unequal social capital. More, where self-supply isn’t officially permitted, the risk of criminalisation and its impacts can be very high.
Health risks:
Abstracting from unsafe sources severely compromises health and well-being, and addressing water quality issues is paramount.
Reliability and sustainability issues:
Self-supply is, in general, unregulated, and hence, unprotected. Over-abstraction of water sources, contamination, and seasonal variability, often driven by more powerful users like large-scale agricultural, property development or business use, can affect the reliability of self-supply systems, impacting on the human rights of poor communities in particular.
Costs:
Self-supply can be costly, particularly for communities in precarious economic situations who are not able to rely on government support for spare parts, materials, or maintenance and monitoring support. Even where self-supply is cost-efficient in financial terms, it still involves significant unpaid effort by community members that are already struggling to make ends meet.
Transparency issues:
Unsupported self-supply is also often invisible. There is little information available to enable better management and accountability, including for example on groundwater abstraction, costs, or accessibility.
What then? Addressing issues through supported self-supply
In progressively realising the right to water, including water for health and food, governments must ensure that everyone can access safe, affordable, and culturally acceptable water services, regardless of location or how the service is provided. This means they cannot roll back service or interfere negatively with existing access to water (or toilets). Despite this, self-supply is criminalised in many countries. Communities without access to public services are blocked from self-providing or arbitrarily cut off from their own water supply.
Government must also use the maximum available resources to provide water to all residents in their jurisdiction, adhering to human rights principles such as equality, non-discrimination, participation, access to information, transparency, accountability, and sustainability. This is especially important with respect to safeguarding the rights of marginalised groups, many of whom are self-providing.
The obligation to provide water services requires that governments create an enabling legal and regulatory environment; ensure inclusive, inter-sectoral planning; put financing mechanisms in place; develop water infrastructure; put appropriate institutional arrangements in place for ongoing provision of the service; and monitor water quality and other standards.
Self-supply can contribute to progressive realisation and be co-created with communities. Governments are still obliged to create an enabling environment for progressive realisation of the right to water, including through self-supply. Support can include:
Enabling legal and regulatory frameworks:
Supported self-supply must be recognised in policies, guidelines, and bylaws. This can include for example the recognition of and engagement with community-based organisations as legal entities and as official water services providers.
Also key is formal recognition of water for small-scale productive use, and better enforcement of regulations on large-scale users and corporates that abstract and pollute rivers or groundwater sources that downstream communities rely on.
Financial support:
Governments can creatively provide financial support for self-supply. Financing mechanisms could include “smart” subsidies, targeted support to highly vulnerable groups, prioritising affordable technologies, or combinations of these and other mechanisms to reduce the financial burden on water users themselves.
In developing financing strategies for the provision of water, the costs of self-supply to particularly poor communities, should be quantified and recognised.
Inclusive and inter-sectoral planning:
Planning and infrastructure development for supported self-supply must prioritise participatory design, with communities at the forefront of decision-making. As the primary managers of their own systems, communities are best positioned to determine what works for them, and governments need to recognise and build on existing self-supply efforts and local expertise.
Inclusive planning also works to help prevent elite capture within vulnerable communities.
Governments must work to link different initiatives and align self-supply efforts with broader water sector planning including for sanitation, electricity, roads, land use management, and housing.
Experiences from Zambia and Zimbabwe demonstrate that cross-sectoral collaboration, with various ministries working together at the local level, significantly enhanced the effectiveness of supported self-supply. This approach also contributed to progress on several Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including those related to health, nutrition, and water.
Technical and institutional support:
It is essential that governments engage with, and provide technical support to, individual households and community-based providers, including guidance on contextually appropriate technical options and training and capacity building for spring protection, safely managing wells, and managing water quality among others.
Support is also needed to advance technologies, to manufacture and sell affordable pumps, including solar pumps, manual drilling, storage tanks, household treatment and other devices. This requires widespread technical training.
Monitoring:
Monitoring, ideally in collaboration with communities is essential to ensure continued safe and secure access to water via self-supply. Key elements to track are water quality, construction standards, surface and groundwater availability, and pollution and abstraction by other actors.
Alongside the physical and technical aspects, tracking the implementation of water and sanitation policies, standards, and plans on a regular basis, including the expansion of services to marginalised and disadvantaged groups needs to occur.
Monitoring costs and integrity risks is also key to addressing issues around equality and discrimination.
Supported self-supply: the way forward
Without formal support, self-supply puts both urban and rural communities at significant risk, particularly as climate change unfolds. Community-driven, supported self-supply should be viewed as one of several solutions to achieving universal access to water and sanitation and improve resilience. Indeed, self-supply is already a reality and can play a crucial role where centralised water infrastructure is impractical or too costly.
But government must be held accountable for their obligations. They can play a key role in providing vulnerable communities with the required assistance to make supported self-supply practicable and sustainable.
What is non-negotiable is adequate and well-targeted support to enable communities to realise their rights to water, food, and life. This requires relationships built on trust. It requires frameworks guided by the human rights principles of equality and non-discrimination as well as the integrity principles of transparency, accountability, participation, and anti-corruption.
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