Water

11 Feb 2011

Rural drinking water and sanitation

The water sector in South Sudan is facing many challenges, including a shortage of human capacity at all levels. There is no systematic capacity development strategy, encouraging is the recent discussion among the government and development partners to look into this.

There are three levels of capacity gaps:

  1. Middle management capacity in the water sector is weak in terms of knowhow and experience. There are gaps in capacities to manage, plan, monitor, evaluate and to manage data.
  2. There is a huge capacity gap at the level of technicians and supervisors in all sorts of technical disciplines. Many of the staff of the water ministries in the States have not yet received formal training.
  3. There are few people with a solid academic background in relevant disciplines.

Lack of training facilities

There is no training institute in South Sudan which can offer practical training courses for technicians and the cadre of the Ministry in the area of rural drinking water and sanitation. Juba University only has a small water unit in the College of Natural Resources and Environment.
 

Creating sanitation awareness

To improve the sanitation situation in the country a major behavioral change of the population is required.
 

Donor harmonization

The main donors in the water sector are those supporting MDTF-South, Basic Services and various NGOs. The most important donors are:

  • The Netherlands;
  • DfID;
  • The European Commission;
  • UNICEF;
  • GTZ;

They inform each other about their programmes through the Donors’ Working Group under the WASH programme.

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