Sustainability of Rural Water Supply Projects in Nicaragua

Access to safe and freshwater service without sustainability is a critical issue for many developing countries. From the past decade, Nicaragua has been working on increasing access to water and sanitation services with sustainability in rural areas through the Emergency Social Investment Fund (Fondo de Inversion Social de Emergencia, FISE) which is the governmental agency in charge of investments in rural water and sanitation solutions. The experience with rural water and sanitation rural systems began in 1977 with the Rural Basic Sanitation National Plan (PLANSAR). PLANSAR was designed to increase coverage of water and sanitation services, using technical solutions of the urban sector. During the period 1977 through 2000 there was no community participation at all. In 2000, The World Bank conducted an evaluation of the social fund and found that half of the sampled systems supplied water on a regular basis, and half supplied water on average only three days per week. The low supply systems experienced operations and maintenance difficulties. In these sampled systems, the operations and maintenance was under the responsibility of the central and municipal agencies and community participation and training was virtually non-existent.