Water Operator Partnerships: The Way Forward
- Supporting WOPs worldwide
- Knowledge development and dissemination
- Connecting mentoring and recipient water operators
- Capacity building
- Funding WOPs
- Related Articles
- Links
Supporting WOPs worldwide
The Global WOPs Alliance aims to embrace the diversity of WOPs efforts worldwide. The Alliance helps to establish regional WOPs platforms and suitable institutional and financial frameworks. It links WOPs networks and programmes with brokers partnerships and assists in knowledge transfer inside and between regions.
There is a WOP for every need – big, small, formal and informal. At the regional level, professional water associations like IWA, NGOs and others, supported by regional development banks and various financial institutions, are working actively within the Alliance to assist operators in their endeavor to establish partnerships.
Knowledge development and dissemination
Water operators – whether mentoring or receiving - should benefit from past experiences and lessons learned. As such it is important that the necessary information is collected, analyzed and disseminated via one or more easily accessible knowledge hubs.
The Global WOPs Alliance will set up a main website portal for the initiative towards the end of 2009. The portal will link to other relevant WOPs web pages. In Asia, a specific web page for the WOPs programme - WaterLinks – has been established, and another page is under development for the WOPs programme in Latin America and the Caribbean. Other regional web pages are expected to follow.
Connecting mentoring and recipient water operators
Whilst it is recognized that WOPs should be demand driven, many potential partners cannot easily find one another. Therefore, a brokering or match-making process is needed, providing partnership facilitation, match-making workshops and other activities.
Members of the Global WOPs Alliance are establishing such a mechanism that will help the parties to prepare, negotiate, fund and implement WOPs.
Capacity building
The rationale behind the WOPs initiative is that the most capacity for improving water and sanitation operators rests with the operators themselves. Such simple activities as classroom and on-the-job training are therefore complementary tools to more structured and comprehensive partnerships that will strengthen the skills of the operators.
Presently, the Global WOPs Alliance secretariat, Cap-Net (UNDP), IWA and other parties are collaboratively working to produce capacity development material and deliver training courses on Integrated Water Resource Management, IWRM, for water operators.
Material on Water Demand Management and Water Safety Planning has been developed for that purpose, and training courses will be organized later during 2009 and 2010 in various regions. Some mentoring operators are establishing regional training centers; others are producing training manuals as part of their partnership arrangements. Relevant capacity building material and manuals will be available at the respective WOPs website pages.
Funding WOPs
WOPs are funded by a diversity of sources, supported by international finance institutions, bilateral aid programmes, or directly through the contribution of the partnering operators themselves. The Global WOPs Alliance will assist extending financial support for
WOPs by elaborating financing and costs haring options, identifying funding sources, encouraging the replication of successful legal and funding models, establishing a donors supported funding pool and providing direct
funding to inter-regional exchange. The regional WOPs programmes will through their secretariats assist the operators to establish partnerships supported by feasible financing mechanisms.
As WOPs may develop after a demand driven match-making process - and maybe through an introductory phase with simple partnership arrangements, there is a need to develop funding models that support the continuation of these partnerships in more structured forms. Naturally, the partnerships must be well defined and demand driven, not-for profit based, and with clearly agreed upon objectives and inputs and outputs.
Consequently, governmental development agencies, international finance institutions, mentoring water operators, recipient water operators, as well as donors from civil society and others are called upon to develop new feasible funding arrangements to cover the various types of WOPs illustrated in this document.
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