Improving Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene needs: Eight Cote d’Ivoire Municipalities Selected to Participated in the USAID-funded MuniWASH Project

It's official, eight municipalities in Côte d'Ivoire were notified of their selection for participation in the West Africa Municipal Water, Sanitation and Hygiene MuniWASH Activity. The MuniWASH activity is a five-year regional project funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and implemented by Tetra Tech, Inc in Benin and Côte d'Ivoire. USAID's objective through this project is to assist municipal governments, national departments and agencies, and service providers to maintain and expand water, sanitation and hygiene services to meet the basic needs of underserved populations and disadvantaged segments of the population living in urban and peri-urban areas of the municipalities.

This announcement is a result of a      selection process involving several state and private agencies such as the General Directorate of Territorial Administration, the National Drinking Water Office, the National Office of Sanitation and Drainage, the Hydraulic Directorate, the Water Distribution Company of Côte d'Ivoire, and finally, the Union of Cities and Communes of Côte d'Ivoire. In Côte d'Ivoire, the eight municipalities are Abengourou, Abobo, Bouaké, Gagnoa, San Pedro and Soubré, Yamoussoukro and Yopougon, some of which are also intervention sites for the USAID-funded Sanitation Services Delivery (SSD) project for the period 2014-2021. MuniWASH will support and extend the achievements of the SSD project as emphasized by MuniWASH Project Director Safaa Fakorede: "MuniWASH will use the sanitation contractors trained by SSD in Benin and Côte d'Ivoire to enable them to scale up their activities, particularly through the mobilization of capital."

During the month of September 2020, the MuniWASH project team met with the municipal councils in each of the target communes. This official notification meeting of the final selection of municipalities was an opportunity to present the MuniWASH project to the various stakeholders. These included mayors, municipal councilors, secretaries general, heads of technical services, some regional directors of ministries in charge of water and sanitation as well as private sector operators operating at the local level.

The MuniWASH implementation team took advantage of this tour to also present the project to the regional authorities including the prefects. The secretary general of the Gagnoa Prefecture was pleased with the implementation of this project focused on capacity building. “The best investment is the one made for people, that is to say capacity building. More than 80% of selected municipal officials are not aware of the duties assigned to them. We must therefore train them," he explained. During the exchanges, it was noted that there is a very high expectation from the municipalities in terms of infrastructure funding. We thought that the project was going to finance the infrastructure directly," said Koulaï Marius, technical director of the municipality of Gagnoa in Côte d'Ivoire. Through this tour, the MuniWASH team explained the project’s role was not to provide direct infrastructure funding, but to holistically improve municipal governance and the investment environment so that the municipalities could secure and manage the funds themselves. For the secretary general of the Soubré municipality, Mr. Lacina N'DA Jean, it is necessary to "support capacity building by granting direct financing to the communes".

MuniWASH places the improvement of municipal management and governance in water, sanitation and hygiene services at the center of its actions. With the support of the Ministry of Territorial Administration through the Directorate of Decentralization and Local Development, the MuniWASH project will strengthen the capacities of the municipalities for better governance of the water and sanitation sector at the municipal level.

In addition, MuniWASH aims to improve the financial sustainability and private sector investment for WASH service providers and to improve the operational reliability of WASH service providers. The project will share successful experiences and lessons learned from the implementation of these activities along with disseminating good practices at national and regional levels, primarily through channels hosted by the African Water Association (AfWA), which will allow a wider audience of municipalities to benefit from the knowledge gained in MuniWASH’s implementation.