Sunday Mail Reporter
The Ministry of Lands, Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Rural Development will this week host a national Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) Joint Sector Review (JSR) conference in Bulawayo to assess the sector’s progress and challenges in ensuring water safety and security countrywide.
The two-day conference begins on Wednesday. It will run under the theme “Climate Resilient WASH Services: A Call to Sustainable Service Delivery” and be officially opened by Dr Anxious Masuka, who is also chair of the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Water, Sanitation and Hygiene.
National WASH director Mr Nesbert Shirihuru said: “The JSR is a joint programming and mutual accountability platform between Government, civil society and private sector development partners and donors.
“So, at the beginning of the year we had a joint work plan for the sector . . . and it is that work plan that we are going to be reflecting on to look at the sector’s progress, challenges, best practices, what do we
take forward and what we leave behind,” he said.
He said that water service delivery is complex and requires a systems-strengthening approach.
“To us, when you see water coming from the taps, it’s not the infrastructure but there are quite a number of building blocks that ensure that we have running water,” he added.
“It starts with the planning at local level, at Government level, the finances.
“It goes on to the water resources, the environment and goes on to accountability in institutions and an enabling environment. So we shall be interrogating service delivery from the lenses of a systems strengthening perspective.
“We are looking at some thematic areas . . . resilient WASH service delivery; we are going to be interrogating WASH sector financing and we are also going to be interrogating the inclusiveness of the processes of delivering services and governance mechanisms and see where the bottlenecks are and how we can remove them and how we can plan for posterity.”
The conference will bring together key ministries, including the Ministry of Local Government and Public Works; the Ministry of Health and Child Care and the Ministry of Finance, Economic Development and Investment Promotion.