By Patrick Coad, Latin America Regional Program Officer, Water For People
Water is often seen as a free gift of nature, a common pool resource that belongs to everyone. However, ensuring long-term access to water requires investment, governance, and long-term planning. At Water For People, we implement a Sustainable Services Checklist to measure our progress toward lasting water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) access.
As we prepare to roll out the 2025 Sustainable Services Checklist, I’m reflecting on the verification process and what it takes to truly measure our progress across the 18 Everyone Forever districts where Water For People works in Bolivia, Guatemala, Honduras, and Peru.
The following takeaways do not include earth-shattering discoveries. Instead, this is aimed at understanding the evolving complexities of the WASH sector in rural Latin America. My goal is to amplify the voices of marginalized communities to better grasp the contextual nuances and continue to contribute to crucial conversations about long-term service delivery.
Everyone Forever: A Systems Approach
The development landscape has shifted dramatically. We’re moving away from siloed, project-focused initiatives towards district-wide systems-strengthening models. Investments in capital maintenance expenditures for large-scale infrastructure projects persist, though a rising concern for efficiency and their long-term effectiveness continues to shift the paradigm. The prioritization of operational and minor maintenance expenses that support the day-to-day operations, management, and minor repairs may have an even larger role in ensuring the uninterrupted functioning of WASH infrastructure. Water For People has been at the forefront of this shift, creating the Everyone Forever model nearly 15 years ago.
At its core, Everyone Forever is a systems-strengthening approach that prioritizes local capacity building to withstand the natural and existential threats that disrupt services. Water For People provides co-financing to improve access, but even the most innovative infrastructure can only marginally improve district-wide service level coverage, continuity, and quality. This is where investment, governance, and long-term planning come in. For that reason, the Everyone Forever model emphasizes the institutionalization of the WASH sector at all administrative levels, meaning local governments and service providers take ownership and adapt service delivery to their context so that services are maintained for all.
We recognize that WASH systems are made up of complex, interconnected components. Our partner, Agenda for Change, highlights these components as eight WASH Systems Building Blocks vital for efficient, long-term service delivery. The Everyone Forever model strengthens these components by targeting key actors: government stakeholders responsible for annual and multi-year planning, regulation and administration, and capital finance (service authorities); The people in water committees carrying out the day-to-day maintenance and operational finance (service providers); and civil society who hold public servants accountable. Our primary goal is to reach Everyone with sustainable WASH services in communities, households, and public institutions. Progress is tracked through annual service level monitoring and the Sustainable Services Checklist, which assesses the strength of the local WASH operating environment.
Defining Sustainability: Beyond a Buzzword
Sustainability is a multifaceted concept, shaped by field experiences and ongoing dialogues with colleagues and local stakeholders. While a universally accepted definition may evade us, we must strive for a core set of universal monitoring indicators and a common framework. This allows for meaningful comparisons across diverse contexts while acknowledging that a "one-size-fits-all" approach is inadequate.
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals promote sustainability as the ability of stakeholders and institutions to maintain high-functioning service levels. Resilience, then, is the ability to absorb external shocks with minimal disruptions to service delivery. In Latin America, these shocks most often include turnover in personnel, natural disasters, economic crises, and public health threats. A Everyone Forever district’s ability to assess, react, and rebound hinges on a robust WASH ecosystem with skilled service authorities and providers.
The district of Cascas, Peru, exemplifies this. After devastating floods struck in 2017, the local WASH technician improved communication by creating simple contact lists with water committee members’ information. In addition, he prioritized the enhancement of the water committee’s capacity. When Typhoon Yaku struck in 2022, water committees were better prepared to assess damages and provide detailed reports, leading to stronger funding proposals. Services were restored within two months of the disaster (except for one community).
Read more about Don Ángel, the WASH technician who responded to the flooding crisis in Cascas, Peru:
Don Ángel: Protecting a District’s Water
Don Ángel went from being a zoologist who worked with livestock to leading the water and sanitation office in the province of Gran Chimu de Cascas in Peru.
Context Matters
The sector needs universal indicators for comparison within and across national borders, but we must avoid imposing solutions by recognizing existing monitoring frameworks. The Sustainable Services Checklist offers a balance: universal indicators are contextualized through specific metrics. The Sustainable Services Checklist evaluates overall sustainability in a district by scoring metrics and, by extension, their corresponding aggregate indicators, which allow partners to identify recurring bottlenecks and plan accordingly.
Long-term sustainability relies on enhancing actors’ capacity, especially service providers. In rural communities throughout Latin America, these grassroots organizations manage day-to-day operations, maintenance, and fiscal administration. Governed by community-agreed bylaws, committee members are typically unpaid volunteers. Addressing bottlenecks, such as micro-meter installation and water quality treatment, requires their active involvement.
Breaking Down Evaluation Silos
We must analyze the correlation between the Sustainable Services Checklist-defined WASH enabling environment and long-term service levels. Which metrics are the best predictors of the variations in levels of service once they reach a certain threshold? We must also understand the interplay between actors across local, subnational, and national administrative levels. The inequities between urban and rural service provision, often stemming from a lack of clear regulation and planning in rural areas, lead to responsibility vacuums and fragmented governance – most frequently leading to sparse or ineffective service delivery. Robust and integrated financial mechanisms are also needed to ensure financing flows to local governments.
Concluding Thoughts
Communities across the region often share a similar perspective that implies water is a free gift of nature and not exclusive. In that sense, it is a common-pool resource. What we pay for is household delivery, minor repairs, infrastructure maintenance, and the conservation of water catchment areas for future generations. The "tragedy of the commons" suggests that unrestricted access to water resources could lead to their overuse and depletion, contamination, and social conflict. Perhaps I am a bit naïve or too optimistic, but, like Dr. Elinor Ostrom, I believe these risks can be mitigated. Her "Eight Rules for Managing the Commons" offers solutions to avoid these catastrophes. These rules are woven into Water For People’s Everyone Forever model and approach, including defining clear boundaries, supporting the local fit, participatory decision-making, monitoring, regulated sanctions, accessible conflict resolution, organizational rights, and nested networks.
Where urban-rural policy gaps create ambiguity, community-based service delivery models that prioritize operational expenses, cost recovery, and sustainability remain crucial. This is what we set out to achieve with the Sustainable Services Checklist. We must recognize the vital role service providers play in maintaining WASH services in remote communities… for Everyone, now and Forever.
Author’s Note: What’s next
The importance of maintaining an objective perspective removed from country programs cannot be underestimated; a responsibility I continue to take seriously. A background in public policy and 17+ years of experience leading water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) programs across Africa, the Americas, and Asia have equipped me with the skills and knowledge necessary to strengthen the verification process.
As mentioned in the introduction, the takeaways captured here do not include earth-shattering discoveries. Instead, this is the first in a series of evidence-based publications aimed at understanding the evolving complexities of the WASH sector in rural Latin America. My goal is to amplify the voices of marginalized communities in an attempt to better grasp the contextual nuances and continue to contribute to crucial conversations about long-term service delivery.