In 2014 in Chum Kiri, a district in the South of Cambodia, SNV mapped 1055 water points. The data were being used by district and commune councils to inform a ‘functionality plan’. In the functionality plan, rural water supply issues are prioritized within the geographical boundaries of the governance area. The plan includes identified solutions, outlined responsibilities, budgets, and work schedules. Examples of proposed solutions in the functionality plans include: install additional tube wells, repair existing well with major breakdowns, re-initiate water user groups at places with public supplies, build capacity of local water supply agents, promote household water treatment, trigger households to invest in larger rainwater harvesting storage capacity, rehabilitate community ponds.
Tim Foster: “The case concerns Water Point Mapping in one district in the south of Cambodia. It is a comprehensive piece of work, the data are clean and robust. Eventually, they decided it was not really scalable or replicable due to the high quality and associated costs that were not matching the available resources at the district and provincial level water offices. They reverted back to a system where village chiefs on annual basis report to the district level official on how many water points there were in each village and how many were functional. The data wasn’t, however, used that much. Cambodia has put together a national level well map.”