About CM

Scaling up community management of rural water supply

Scaling up entails institutional support to community managed systems with the objective to make these systems sustainable and equitable and to increase the coverage of rural water supply.

In December 2001 IRC together with WEDC, Plan, WaterAid, SKAT and the WSSCC organised a conference on this theme. The most interesting outputs of this conference are the background paper, the conference statement and a series of case studies from Switzerland , Uganda, India and South Africa . There is also a report of the conference .

The above mentioned organisations have organised to keep on advocating scaling up of community management and to help developing appropriate models for scaling up. They have written Terms of Reference (available in "thematic group" in the activities' section) for their group. One of the most important initiatives of the group is an e-conference that was organised in June-July 2002. IRC wrote a background paper for the e-conference. There is an archive of all 100 e-mail messages sent to the conference, but IRC also wrote weekly summaries. A synthesis report of the e-conference will be published in August 2002.

During the e-conference participants sent interesting case studies on scaling up community management.

To read these case studies and other materials, go to the e-conference resource page.