ABSTRACT
Local governance for water and sanitation must address the needs of low-income groups. It must seek the most appropriate way to achieve this, and this will be much influenced by local circumstances including local resource availabilities and local capacities (within government and civil society). Otherwise, the internationally agreed upon targets for water and sanitation will not be met. This may sound like a plea for high-cost public sector piped provision to each home, but low-income households also want reliable, sustainable systems, and high-cost systems that fail to generate the revenues needed to maintain them are not sustainable and are rarely reliable. Low-income groups also know that if there are water shortages in a network, their settlements are likely to be the ones that get cut off or get restricted supplies. They have a strong interest in well managed, well financed, well maintained systems. They also have the least resources to help them to manage when centralized water supply, sanitation or drainage systems break down.
