The Democratic and Economic Governance (DEG) thematic window aims to improve governance in the water and sanitation sectors. The overarching goal is to accelerate progress worldwide towards achieving the MDG7 target to halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. It is internationally recognised that the problems of the water and sanitation sectors are more often rooted in poor governance than in scarcity of water.
JPs in the DEG thematic area align well with the global challenge by focussing on the strengthening of government capacity to manage water provision and water quality; support to regulatory reforms, decentralisation and capacity development for improved services; involvement of civil society representatives and enhancing the role of women in planning and policies regarding water; and establishment of mechanisms to increase investments into the water sector.
While there are huge disparities between and within countries, the world is generally on track to reach the MDG drinking water target, but off track for the sanitation target. The disparities in the access and use of safe water and sanitation relate to economic, geographic and socio-cultural factors. Many JPs direct their activities towards marginalised populations, often in remote areas. Several of the JPs actively pursue novel ways of communicating across socio-cultural borders. Both water and sanitation require additional priority and funding on a world-wide scale, yet sanitation in particular receives insufficient attention, resources, and corresponding policies. Some JPs have also focused on enhancing the mutual understanding of rights and obligations in the relationship between providers and users of water and sanitation services. This is a promising way of working towards a rights-based perspective in water supply and sanitation service provision.
The purpose of DEG KM plan is to ensure that generated knowledge and innovations from the Fund’s DEG thematic window are properly documented, analyzed and widely disseminated for uptake and replication. The key elements of the plan therefore consist of knowledge capture and development, as a means of collecting lessons learned (or ‘useful experiences’) to serve as a basis for the further investigation, analysis and documentation; knowledge sharing and dissemination, including the sharing of these lessons with programme stakeholders and wider audiences; and JP sustainability, aimed at ensuring that the experiences and lessons of the MDG-F are carried over to future development initiatives in the DEG thematic area.