MUS overview

The MUS project has two objectives: the generation and synthesis of new knowledge and capacity building for scaling up.

1. Generation and Synthesis of New Knowledge: To generate a knowledge base and synthesize the knowledge into innovative models, guidelines, and tools for rural and peri-urban water supply systems that fulfill domestic and productive needs; sustainable and inexpensive; include methodologies to support water users associations; have quantifiable positive impacts on food security, income, work load, health and well being, in particular of women and children, and, where relevant, weakened persons with HIV/AIDS and youth-headed households.
2. Capacity building for scaling up: To build the capacity of project partners and to engage, inform, prepare and build the capacity of other professionals and policy makers from the domestic and productive water sectors in NGOs, government, financing institutions, private sector, and development organizations, to jointly promote a 100-fold wider implementation of multiple-use water supply systems after this project.

The MUS project seeks to:

• improve poor people’s food security and health,
• reduce unpaid workloads,
• alleviate poverty, and
• enhance gender equity.

These goals can, we believe, be achieved through a more effective use of small-scale water supplies, and by generating and testing models, guidelines and tools for sustainable multiple-use systems that are financially affordable to the poor. These are intended to lead to a 100-fold up-scaling of the multiple-use approach after the project.

Strategy

The project aims to meet its goals by combining action research with capacity building. The action research will focus on developing and testing the mentioned models, guidelines and tools.

Action research

This concentrates on solving real world problems in support of, and with the active collaboration of, stakeholders. It is a flexible process that combines action and multidisciplinary research in a win-win format, hopefully ensuring that action is more efficient and research more relevant.

The project will engage, inform and strengthen the capacity of project partners and professionals from the domestic and productive water sectors with the aim of scaling up more integrated approaches to water services at local level.

Action research and capacity building are carried out in learning alliances of stakeholders working together on the issue of multiple-use water services and related initiatives. Learning alliances will be formed at both national and local levels in each focus country.

Learning alliances

These are partnerships between practitioners, researchers, policy makers and activists aimed at sharing insights and concern among stakeholders, providing a platform to discuss and decide on integrated uses of water, and bringing widespread ownership of the multiple-use concepts, so that findings can be taken to scale.