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Published on: 24/09/2014

At 3am any decent person should not be worrying about the state of the world: I am lying awake worrying about Priceless!, the book just published by IRC[1]. My name is on the cover and my egotistical self is wondering if the whole thing has been a gigantic mistake, an end of project trophy.

A book is a collective effort - not just by authors – but by those who give interviews, edit, find pictures, set up production schedules and turn the words and pictures into smart product. Then a launch (in Stockholm) –“ Ta-da ; Here I am; Read me! Now clap.”

Priceless! tells the story of the five year WASHCost project to disentangle the costs of water, sanitation and hygiene. The project has influenced international discourse about WASH services and how costs relate to quality and sustainability, and has spun off assets such as the WASHCost Share tool. Things are changing and that’s good. 

But Priceless! is about the journey, not the destination; part economics, part history, part sociology, part soap opera.  The question that kept me awake was, ‘is it worth reading?’

My insomnia drove me to do something desperate. I read the book. And – spoiler alert – despite a general lack of romance, villains, and treasure, I was reminded of the richness of what we had learned.

Communities have their own ideas about what is worth paying for: In one Ghanaian community, poor villagers who were unwilling to pay for water at the pump, paid US$ 1.40 a week to vendors on bicycles to deliver water of dubious quality. A member of a village water committee uses lake water to cook yams, because she says it adds taste to the food. A woman with virtually no money in Mozambique pays neighbours more for water from their taps than she would pay at the water point – because she can buy tiny amounts at a time and not have to carry water. Even in the Sahel, the driest region of Burkina Faso, half of the population never go to water points where they would have to pay, but stick to their free traditional sources and wells.  One of the golden economic lessons from the book is that people do not use services they do not value.

The amount of work needed to collect data is striking. It took five people ten days to survey a habitation of 200 houses in India and six person-days to enter the results. In Mozambique, data collectors made three visits to each community. In rural Burkina Faso, they spent two days at each of 80 water points, watching who came and how much water they took. Teams had to be creative to make up for lack of official data. WASHCost in Ghana and Burkina Faso produced their own maps showing service area boundaries and populations because basic village maps did not exist. In India women used stones to score their opinions about water services.

Service ladders that link costs to levels (“rungs”) of service were painfully assembled. As Patrick Moriarty, IRC Director said: “If the service is lousy, then knowing it cost US$ 25 a head is not very interesting.” But how much water is adequate, how far away, of what quality and how reliable a service? Does it matter what kind of latrine you have or are the only things that matter security, reliability, health and safety?

Many unanswerable questions have to be answered. How do you record how much water people use if they take the laundry to the river? How do you estimate the life span of a pump (and therefore the annual capital cost) if 36% of pumps are non-functional but some still work after 30 years use? What is the cost of a latrine built by a family who do not earn a wage and use only locally found materials?

As for the soap opera, one theme was the palpable tension between centralised planning and local decision making.  Some country level researchers would have valued a more centralisation approach to data design while project director (and co-author) Catarina Fonseca believes that the WASHCost methodology could never have emerged from ‘four or five sector professionals sitting in The Hague’. There was a struggle over many months, to reconcile data collected in different countries in different ways and to simplify data collection questions.

Over five years the technology of communication changed dramatically. Skype and Twitter were ‘new technology’ when the project started in 2008, but routine by the time it finished in 2013. However, there was a seemingly endless search for “fit for purpose” monitoring tools.

A clear gap in the space-time continuum developed, time speeding up as the project neared its end. As Amélie Dubé, research officer for WASHCost Burkina Faso, said: “If you are doing a five-year project, you really need ten years to do it!

Whether this book is well written or not, is for others to judge. However, chapters on managing projects, the legacy in countries and final reflections and strengths and weaknesses provide plenty to chew on, and little vanity.  Next time I am lying awake at 3am, I will try to find something else to worry about.

Priceless! Uncovering the real costs of water and sanitation can be downloaded at http://www.ircwash.org/resources/priceless-uncovering-real-costs-water-and-sanitation



[1]  McIntyre, P., Casella, D., Fonseca, C., and Burr, P. 2014. Priceless! Uncovering the real costs of water and sanitation

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