Lifecycle Cost of Water Points in Bangladesh:Issues of Community Cost Sharing and Sustainability

Government agencies and NGOs in many cases establish large number of water points to increase their coverage, without considering much about sustainability. Hence, sustainability of water points under the existing modality of community cost sharing always remain a problem. Many facilities become nonfunctional due to lack of fund generated at the community level to maintain these facilities after phase out. Without having any scientific evidence on the extent of maintenance cost in a project life cycle agencies taking care of rural water supply used to ignore this funding issue, considering operations and maintenance as a minor expenditure to be taken care of voluntarily by the society itself, and hence, don't have any budget allocated to carry on such maintenance activities. This paper, however, highlighted that maintenance cost contribute a lion share to the total life cycle cost of water points, and so should be taken care of seriously. Analyzing life cycle cost data from a randomly selected sample of 220 water points, 1259 household beneficiaries, and other key government officials and private entrepreneurs in eight different locations of Bangladesh this study demonstrated that operation and capital maintenance expenditure occupy a lion share of the total life cycle cost of water points that would be as high as 90 per cent in few instances. Similar study can also be conducted in other developing countries to prioritize the issue of operations and maintenance cost and, thereby, develop specific business models for community cost sharing, to improve the sustainability of water points.