Nancy J. Eslick: “Effective water management is a cost-efficient strategy for climate adaptation”

To address these issues, USAID is focused on creating collaborative and lasting solutions. We are building local capacity, fostering partnerships, and mobilizing blended finance solutions to help close the $1 trillion global financing gap needed to achieve water security. The Agency’s comprehensive approach includes regulatory improvements, supporting the creditworthiness of relevant authorities, and professionalization, which strengthens the quality of service, making water systems more attractive to investors and customers alike. For example, in Kenya, we provide technical assistance and targeted investments in solarization and water metering to improve a utility’s efficiency and creditworthiness. Often, utilities struggle with high power bills that prevent them from pumping water to their customers, so USAID supports the switch to solar energy, which reduces electricity costs and avoids frequent service outages while also increasing climate resilience and supporting renewable energy. Similarly, we often help utilities replace non-functioning water meters to reduce non-revenue water. Together, these small improvements can result in more water delivered to more customers with expanded pumping hours, improved quality of service, reduced energy costs, and increased revenues.

Gender equality and inclusivity are central to the Strategy. How is USAID ensuring that women and marginalized groups are not left behind in efforts to achieve water security?

At USAID, we recognize that gender equality and inclusivity are essential to achieving water security. The Global Water Strategy aligns with other key national strategies on gender equity and equality, promoting women’s economic security, addressing gender-based violence, and enhancing climate resilience for those most vulnerable to its impacts.

Strengthening governance is essential for service delivery, effective water resources management, and a precondition to mobilizing finance

A key principle of the Global Water Strategy is ensuring that our water and sanitation programs focus on helping marginalized groups and those in vulnerable situations, especially women. This is reflected across all of our strategic objectives, including supporting women in taking on leadership roles in regulatory agencies, service providers, and water resource authorities. We also focus on empowering women economically and supporting women sanitation entrepreneurs in establishing and expanding their businesses. This approach not only enhances their economic security but also strengthens community resilience. Our work to strengthen water and sanitation products and services also aims to reduce inequalities among women and other historically marginalized groups, like ethnic minorities and persons with disabilities.

Additionally, water and sanitation services serve as a critical entry point for our work on menstrual health and hygiene (MHH). By collaborating across sectors and connecting water and sanitation services with education, health, and other linked sectors, we are addressing issues that reflect how menstruation-related stigma and lack of menstruation-related support and information can impact a person’s entire life. This includes ensuring that boys and girls understand that menstruation is a natural and healthy process, confronting harmful beliefs and stigma around menstruation that can prevent menstruators from accessing food, water, and shelter once a month, and improving access to menstrual products and hygiene facilities in schools, healthcare settings, and workplaces.

USAID is also committed to increasing collaboration with civil society, especially those led by and for marginalized groups, such as youth, women, and LGBTQI+ persons. This is an important shift for the global water and sanitation community, which has historically focused more on infrastructure than on the people most affected.

The 2023 USAID Annual Report mentions a $700 million investment in high-priority countries. What specific impacts do you anticipate from this investment, and how will success be measured?

Our investments in water and sanitation in 21 high-priority countries in Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa are supporting local solutions for managing water resources, expanding safe drinking water and sanitation services, and improving available hygiene products and the practice of key hygiene behaviours. At least 50 percent of those reached by this investment will be women and girls, and it includes a focus on communities that have never before had access to these basic services due to a range of local vulnerabilities.

We take a holistic approach to measuring success, using a comprehensive set of standard indicators while continuously innovating toward new metrics that capture the broader impact of our work. This includes better measuring our efforts to support marginalized populations in gaining access to sanitation, tracking progress on the ambitious targets laid out in the 2022-2027 Global Water Strategy, and working to enhance our understanding of the indirect impacts of our transformational work. All high-priority countries have costed, results oriented plans in support of the Global Water Strategy.

USAID’s focus on locally-led development is a core element of the Global Water Strategy. How is USAID working with local partners to ensure sustainable outcomes in water management?

At USAID, we understand that water is inherently local and must be integrated across all parts of society to achieve sustainable development outcomes. This truth is integrated across the Global Water Strategy’s operating principles, from working through and strengthening local systems to focusing on meeting the needs of marginalized and underserved people and communities. These principles align with USAID’s Local Capacity Strengthening Policy by creating accountability for effective water and sanitation programming and equitable partnerships. These cannot be achieved without an inclusive and locally-led approach to development programming.

USAID supports the switch to solar energy, which reduces costs and avoids frequent service outages while increasing climate resilience

Specifically, USAID integrates and builds on local knowledge and expertise in our water and sanitation programs, which includes the unique social, cultural, political, economic, and environmental contexts of each community. We have learned that this approach not only fosters empowerment — which is a foundation for local leadership that continues long after USAID’s investments — but also enhances conflict sensitivity, ensures sustainability, and creates the basis for improved health outcomes.

For example, in Peru, USAID is building on long-held traditional knowledge to scale up nature-based solutions to improve water availability for local service providers. In Ethiopia, USAID’s market-based approach is empowering local sanitation entrepreneurs, as a key part of the local water and sanitation system, to drive transformative progress in their communities. In both instances, the work not only improves water or sanitation services but also empowers individuals and strengthens local systems, showcasing the vital role of local actors in achieving sustainable water and sanitation solutions.

Nancy with USAID/Tajikistan Mission Director, Peter Riley, and community leaders participating in a ceremony to open a new piped water system. Photo credit: USAID.

A locally-led approach to water resources management also includes recognizing the diverse governmental responsibilities and levels of decentralization that may affect the water sector. In many regions, water management is decentralized, meaning that the local government is responsible for managing and allocating water resources for household use, agriculture, and industry. In these contexts, community-led development is essential for creating and supporting strong water systems capable of delivering services that last through more direct engagement between local government, service providers, and customers. In other contexts, water resources management may be part of broader national systems managed by Ministries of Environment or Public Works. In these cases, community leadership is still critical for creating government accountability and ensuring the needs of multiple types of water users are met, though the approach to bridging local water users and national decision-makers may differ. By utilizing a tailored approach and working collaboratively with local partners across systems, locally-led development supports functioning, efficient water and sanitation systems that plan, finance, and deliver services for everyone.

In the Strategy, there is a strong emphasis on private-sector engagement. What role does the private sector play in achieving USAID’s water and sanitation goals, and what partnerships can you highlight?

Our strong emphasis on private-sector engagement reflects our commitment to partnerships, recognizing that no single actor — whether it be a bilateral donor, a multilateral development bank, the private sector, or domestic resources — can bridge the $1 trillion global financing gap needed to achieve global water security. This is why we actively collaborate with donors, governments, nonprofits, and the private sector. These partnerships help stretch our investments, attract more funding to the sector, and tap expertise and services from private sector stakeholders that help us reach even more people with water and sanitation.

The private sector plays a critical role in mobilizing commercial finance, delivering solutions at scale, and driving innovations. Yet it often needs assistance to be fully unleashed in the countries where USAID works. Through the Global Water Strategy, USAID aims to mobilize $1 billion by 2027 for climate-resilient water and sanitation services and strengthen at least 1,000 water sector institutions and service providers. This work will mobilize funds from a mix of private investments, government appropriations, and user fees. These efforts lay a foundation for a higher-performing and more financially viable water and sanitation sector that, in turn, attracts private investment and spurs innovation.

A notable example is our public-private partnership with LIXIL, a leading global building materials company, and its SATO social business unit. Through this partnership, known as the Partnership for Better Living (PBL), we are not only partnering with the private sector but also learning from and leveraging their expertise to grow sustainable sanitation markets around the world. Since 2021, the PBL partnership has facilitated the sale of over 367,000 sanitation and hygiene products to underserved communities and supported SATO's entry into five new country markets. These efforts reached an estimated 1.5 million people with improved sanitation and hygiene solutions, with LIXIL contributing $18 million in non-USAID funding.

With the global water crisis exacerbated by climate change and geopolitical challenges, what do you see as the biggest obstacles to achieving a water-secure world, and how is USAID tackling them?

The greatest obstacles to a water-secure world mirror today’s most pressing global challenges: governance and financing gaps, climate change, and conflict. And we are addressing these challenges in four novel ways through the U.S. Global Water Strategy. First, we are focused on strengthening governance and institutions, such as regulators, basin authorities, and water utilities, to ensure our partner countries can sustain water and sanitation services over the long term. Second, we are laser-focused on mobilizing finance from all sources and helping to establish vibrant markets for water and sanitation products and services, as we know the private sector has a huge role to play. Third, we have integrated climate change in important ways into our current approach. For instance, we have elevated the role of data and climate information services in predicting floods and droughts for water utilities and farmers. Finally, we build on our world-renowned work in humanitarian water and sanitation, as we recognize that no corner of the world is now immune to disasters. To be effective, we need to approach development in concert with humanitarian and peace-building approaches.

USAID is committed to increasing collaboration with civil society, especially those led by and for marginalized groups

Despite these daunting challenges, USAID continues to help millions of people gain access to water and sanitation services and benefit from improved water resources management annually. In 2023, as a result of collective efforts with our partners, 4 million more people gained access to sustainable sanitation services. We mobilized $133 million in new financing for the water and sanitation sectors globally, bringing our total to $1.2 billion mobilized since we started tracking this metric five years ago. Since the 2008 Congressional water directive, USAID has supported 70 million people in gaining access to safe drinking water and nearly 55 million people in accessing improved sanitation.

These numbers represent far more than statistics — they reflect transformative change in daily lives. Through the Global Water Strategy’s whole-of-government approach and its cross-cutting strategic objectives, our work bolsters global health, prosperity, stability, and resilience in a world facing many compounding threats.

Looking ahead, what are the most critical areas of focus for USAID under the Global Water Strategy, and how can international stakeholders best support these efforts?

The private sector plays a critical role in mobilizing commercial finance, delivering solutions at scale, and driving innovations

A major priority for me is to ensure that we are maximizing American taxpayer dollars by channelling our resources to the places and through the approaches that will produce the greatest impact. Under the Strategy, we have 21 designated high-priority countries for water and sanitation assistance. We have selected these countries because the needs are high, but also because strong and committed partnerships in those countries make them opportune places to work. We strive for the most effective approaches, focusing on governance, finance, and institutions, because strengthening the enabling environment will result in a far greater number of people gaining access over time.

What does this look like? The Philippines, one of our high-priority countries, is incredibly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Water service providers bear much of the expense as they have higher costs for water treatment and infrastructure maintenance due to damage from extreme weather events. We have worked with institutions at all levels — national and local governments, local communities, and service providers — to better plan for the effects of climate change. For example, our project on the ground helps these institutions access hydrological and climate data, enabling them to more accurately predict water availability and source water for utilities more effectively. This data has helped provincial governments in the Philippines develop integrated water security plans that benefit both people and ecosystems.

Another major priority is developing strategic partnerships and leveraging resources. Our recent work emphasizes the importance of innovative collaboration. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), another high-priority country, USAID launched a new trilateral partnership with the Governments of the DRC and Germany. Under two new agreements, USAID will provide a total of $29.7 million in initial support to the German development bank KFW, to build decentralized water infrastructure, and to bolster GIZ’s technical support wrap-around services to ensure the infrastructure succeeds in improving access. This partnership leverages each of our governments' long-standing work with the Government of DRC and will engage both the national water utility and provincial governments, aiming to put them in the lead of their own water solutions. Similarly, at Stockholm International Water Institute's World Water Week, we announced our groundbreaking partnership with the World Bank, which will enhance the performance of the national utility, REGIDESO, to provide water access to 12 million people and basic sanitation access to 8 million people across nine provinces of the country. Both of these partnerships help USAID meet its national target of mobilizing $50 million in non-USG funding for water and sanitation in the DRC.

Together, we can help bring about a water-secure world for all.