Water & Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP) is a tri-sector partnership between the private sector, civil society and academia focused on addressing the increasing global problem of inadequate access to water and sanitation for the urban poor and the attainment of the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets, particularly those relating to water and sanitation.

WSUP’s mission is to improve the lives of the urban poor in developing countries by strengthening the capacity of local service providers and others to provide sustainable water and sanitation services, promote good hygiene and raise the health and environmental standards of the community.

 


What WSUP Does

At the heart of WSUP’s approach is its strong emphasis on working with service providers and strengthening their capacity to deliver services to the urban poor.

WSUP-supported projects work with the low income communities to ensure service levels are adequate, affordable and reflect the needs and demands of the community as well as ensuring that their responsibilities as good consumers are met. 

In addition, WSUP works with both the service providers and the community to open dialogue between them.

There are great benefits in this partnership approach for all stakeholders: consumers, local service providers, local NGOs, donors and the private sector. The most important stakeholders - the urban poor - gain access to lasting water and sanitation services and actively participate throughout the project.

 


How WSUP Works

WSUP works to support the adoption and replication of effective, sustainable and scalable models of pro-poor urban water and sanitation services by service providers and/or national governments.

To achieve this, WSUP empowers service providers to demonstrate effective models in order to mobilise investments for further improvements and promotes successful approaches internationally.

This is achieved by building long term partnerships with service providers to plan, design and deliver urban water and sanitation programmes which contribute to achieving universal service coverage, are sustainable and can be scaled up across cities and towns.

These partnerships are framed by performance based contracts between WSUP and the service provider partner which outline joint resource commitments to deliver a joint programme.

WSUP has called these contracts Professional Service Agreements and they have been replicated across all of the programmes to date.

 


Where WSUP Works

WSUP supported programmes are under implementation in Bangladesh, India, Kenya (Nairobi and Naivasha), Madagascar, Mozambique and Zambia. Further programmes are under development in Ghana and Mali.

 


Achievements

To date, the nine projects have achieved:

596,000 now with improved access to safe, affordable water
80,000 now using improved sanitation facilities
744,000 exposed to hygiene promotion messages
6 water LSPs with strengthened capacity in key operational and institutional areas including non-revenue water reduction, establishing pro-poor units, improved billing and revenue and better relations with communities
25 sanitation LSPs with strengthened capacity in developing viable and sustainable improved sanitation services including citywide planning, community and household level latrine construction and sludge removal systems over 50 CBOs / NGOs in 22 slums now managing local community water and sanitation services
WSUP currently spends about £4 million per year which has been provided by a range of funders including DFID, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, KfW, Rockefeller Foundation, USAID and others, as well as its members.