Concerted Municipal Strategies
The CMS program was implemented between 2007 and 2010 by MDP and pS-Eau with financial support from the European Commission’s ACP-EU Water Facility and the French Development Agency.
African towns are increasingly faced with the challenges of developing and sustainably managing water and sanitation services. In accordance with national policies and strategies, the responsibility for implementing water and sanitation services most often falls to local authorities. It has thus been necessary to build the capacities of these municipalities to enable them to undertake both their contracting authority role (particularly with regard to planning) and the technical supervision of local actors.
The aim of the approaches used in the CMS program is to help municipalities develop both specific knowledge of the sector’s local needs and issues and a pragmatic vision for defining means of intervention and prioritizing actions; all this as part of a concerted process that involves all local stakeholders.
This program has enabled pilot municipal strategies for water and sanitation to be developed in twelve large towns in West, Central and East Africa and has led to greater consideration being given to the concept of pooling resources on a regional scale so as to improve services in small towns in three countries of West Africa. Methodological tools have been developed to support this process and a description of the training needs of the main actors involved in providing these water and sanitation services is also available.
Program's components
The CMS program included four main components:
- Concerted municipal strategies and action plans for large towns in Africa
- Regional strategies to support small African towns
- Production and dissemination of methodological guides
-
Training needs assessment of the new water and sanitation professions
In addition, the CMS program particularly focused on the issue of sanitation.
Lessons learned and dissemination
Based on the lessons learned from the CMS program, six methodological guides have been developed for use by local water and sanitation stakeholders. These can be downloaded here and are available in both English and French.
Please also see the CMS program final evaluation report, Rapport de l'évaluation finale du programme SMC (in French) , produced in 2011 by Stef Lambrecht and which can be viewed here.
Contacts:
-
Christophe Le Jallé, pS-Eau, le-jalle@pseau.org
-
Félix Adégnika, PDM, adegnikaf@yahoo.fr
Concerted Municipal Strategies (CMS), a program financed by the European commission ACP-EU Water Facility and Agence française de développement (AFD).
