Empowering Communities through Water Supply Projects
Annual Conference
❄
Water supply projects in developing communities usually deliver physical infrastructure, but often fail to enhance the capacity of communities and their partner organisations to deliver future projects. This paper uses the Wawan Rainfall Harvesting Project (jointly led by the all-female Wawan Fonhal Development Council, Engineers Without Borders NZ and Rotary) in remote north Ambrym, Vanuatu, as a case study. It investigates how projects can be tailored to enhance the capacity of local and international community organisations to carry out future projects and/or meet their own infrastructure needs.
It concludes that lack of meaningful engagement in projects is a barrier to community capacity development. Furthermore, even technically successful projects may reduce community capacity through disillusionment and expenditure of limited resources. A different model of project management and additional resourcing are required in order to realise sustainable enhancement of community capacity.