This November, the MUS Group co-hosts a follow-up symposium with RiPPLE, in Addis Ababa, on “Multiple-use services: from practice to policy“. Building on achievements of the first symposium, this symposium seeks to explore recent research and practice experiences on MUS, provoke debate around lessons learnt and utilise these experiences and lessons to draw out some sound policy that can be carried forward.


Background
Five years ago, the Multiple Use water Services (MUS) Group, emerged from a symposium held in Johannesburg on ‘Poverty and Productive Uses of water at the Household Level’. Proceedings from this first symposium led to the following statements:

• Productive use of water at the household level by poor people reduces poverty
• People require more than their domestic water needs to be productive
• Productive use enhances the sustainability of water supply systems and services
• People need local solutions and multiple sources for multiple uses
• An integrated approach is essential to achieve significant impacts on poverty

MUS MUS
For the newcomers, MUS is the approach of service provision implemented that aims to integrate both domestic and productive needs of users. While, the MUS approach has growing evidence suggesting it lends itself to supporting livelihoods and more sustainable water services, its implementation throws up challenges at the community-level management, and national and decentralised level enabling environments. A forthcoming working paper from RiPPLE takes a closer look the costs and benefits of MUS, and based on a case study of three sites in Ethiopia. Comparing and analysing a range of indicators, including traditional measures, the study found that benefits outweigh costs for both MUS systems over single-use systems and for moving from a single-use to MUS systems. Questions around how to successfully implement and scale up the benefits of MUS are universal, and should form part of the debate and policy-forming at the MUS symposium.

Who’s there?
Currently the MUS Group acts as both a think-tank and a platform for developing thinking, sharing ideas and experiences, advocating for change and disseminating information related to the multiple use of water. This MUS symposium should see the coming together of professionals from the water sector, including researchers, practitioners, policy makers and donors, as well as those involved in wider rural development, livelihoods and economic development issues. About 25 papers have been accepted and present different aspects of MUS, from academic research to experiences of local implementation, to be explored at the symposium.

Objectives & Programme
This MUS symposium seeks to provide a space for sharing experiences and lessons learnt on different aspects of MUS, and discussing implications of taking MUS forward in implementation, with strong policy recommendations emerging. The programme is made up of various sessions using different facilitation methods, to further the symposium objectives including thematic sessions on key issues, research findings, interactive debates, video and photo-essays, and policy-focused discussion sessions.

For more information and details on how to register, please visit: http://www.musgroup.net/page/746

Tags: conferences, MUS

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 17th, 2008 at 5:42 pm and is filed under Supporting Nile-region learning, Understanding water and growth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.