Assessing Human Resource Requirements to Achieve the Water and Sanitation MDGs in Low and Middle Income countries
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Successful achievement of the MDGs related to water and sanitation will require the right number of staff, in the right place, at the right time and equipped with the relevant skills to be able to design, implement and manage projects. In order to assess the capacity in the sector the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) commissioned a research study focusing on case studies in Bangladesh, East Timor, Mali, South Africa and Zambia. The aim was to develop and pilot a methodology in these five countries in order to derive quantitative and qualitative data about human resource requirements in the sector.
During the study, human resource requirements were considered according to four categories: i) engineers ii) associated professionals, ii) technicians, and iv) skilled workers. The study did not attempt to model other elements of the enabling environment such as financing or institutional capacity. The fieldwork involved WASH actor surveys and semi-structured interviews; staffing records for government agencies were reviewed to determine profile of WASH staff; a survey was undertaken of private contractors identified by government and donor agencies as having a WASH profile and a similar survey was undertaken of national and international NGOs working in the WASH sector. These surveys also provided a range of other information for the study such as an indication of un-met demand within the sector, correlation between formal qualifications and occupations and the rates of loss of trained personnel to other sectors.
The research confirmed that there is a significant shortfall in the quantity of capacity in the sector. Preliminary estimates suggest that approximately 2.5 million new engineers, technicians and health promoters are needed to be post by 2015 in sub-Saharan Africa in order to meet the MDG targets. Deficits are particularly pronounced in the rural sector with problems related to the recruitment and deployment of staff for more remote postings. The study clearly shows that human resource requirements in the sanitation sector are much greater than in the water sector. Attention should also be paid to training skilled and unskilled workers for the delivery of basic services, service backlogs as well as to operation and maintenance to ensure that further backlogs are not created. This requires strengthening the coordination of capacity development activities and findings ways of institutionalizing training in relevant training institutions.
Some countries achieve better access to WASH than others with the same level of resources, but in virtually all cases, as well as increasing the number of staff, the development of the capacity of existing staff is required. But, the problem won’t be solved overnight: Even if countries have the capacity for training –and the required investments were committed it will take time to train a significant number of new workers (an estimated 10 years for engineers including post graduate training and necessary work experience), which has implications for the attainment of the MDGs .
In addition to the range of human resource development activities for improving basic education and enabling access to vocation training, there is also a need to consider ways in which to improve the leadership and management of organizations, employment conditions and other work-related incentives. Effective strategies to retain existing staff and increase productivity (without increasing the numbers of workers) will be critical to meeting the MDGs. In particular, levels of remuneration have a significant influence on the incentives for an individual to stay working within the sector and to be adequately motivated.
The research demonstrated that derivation of robust and reliable estimates of people working in the WASH sector is complicated and prone to many problems. There tend to be no cross-sectoral national databases (such as national registers or employment figures) that account for the number of workers in service and their qualifications. In addition, those data sources that are available are often incomplete/unreliable or else and contain little disaggregation of data according to gender, ethnicity, or socioeconomic groups
The Bangladesh study in particular demonstrated the mismatch between the official government statistics and the figures used by the development community. In Zambia, the case study suggested that those engaged in the private sector may be undercounted by official statistics because contractors might not be registered with the National Council for Construction either because they do not meet the qualifications or because they do not see a need to register.
