First introduced in a military sense, strategy development is now used by companies, NGO’s, and communities. Although the term is mainly used in business studies, it is crucial for a successful change in sanitation and water management: after a community has done the preliminary assessment of the current status and has a clear vision of what should be done in the water and sanitation sector, it needs to develop a long-term strategy to define how to reach the appropriate goals.
Generally, the development of the strategy is necessary in order to:
- Define a consistent approach to the local Sustainable Sanitation and Water Management action plan;
- Help maintain the overall direction of local policies and prevent these policies from being affected by short-term political interests or changes in elected representatives and staff;
- Direct and focus actions and projects to be carried out as part of the local Sustainable Sanitation and Water Management action plan; and
- Identify cases where it is necessary to reach outside local government boundaries to gain the support and capacity necessary to achieve certain objectives
The following steps are a framework for developing a community strategy:
1st Step – Crafting Mission, Vision, and Value Statements
- The mission is a brief, typically one-sentence statement that defines the fundamental purpose of the community. It should include what the community provides for its residents and inform about the overall goal they have come together to pursue.
- The values of a community prescribe its desired behaviour, character, and culture.
- The vision is a concise statement that defines the mid- to long-term goals (three to ten years) of a community.
2nd Step – Define and Decompose Strategic Goals
Quantifying the vision makes it possible to integrate target setting with the exploration of feasible strategies. The vision’s quantified success factor becomes the reference point for judging the feasibility of strategies. Therefore, in this step, the specific goals referring to the vision should be developed. Possible goals could concern issues on both the hardware (technical) and the software (social, political, cultural, etc.) side.
3rd Step – Strategic Analysis
With a clear picture of what it needs to achieve, the community must now perform an internal and external analysis.
- External analysis: The external analysis should mainly include the existing policies and legal framework. National and international guidelines or restrictions should necessarily be considered when developing the strategy. Also, environmental issues like water pollution, climate change and soil degradation are important external factors.
- Internal analysis: For the internal analysis, it is most important to consider background information like socio cultural issues to find out about the communities’ own performance and capabilities.
After performing the external and internal analysis, a SWOT analysis should be conducted.
4th Step – Strategy Formulation
The strategy formulation consists of many parts:
- The strategy needs to be formulated and documented, including creating a community action plan. This ensures that the change of the strategy is linked to the planning and execution process.
- The developed strategy should be transparent for all community members. Therefore, awareness raising, for example through local media campaigns, is of great importance.
- Furthermore, the new strategy should be adapted in the policies and legal framework of the community to enable its enforcement.
Even though these four steps can be seen as a framework for developing a strategy, the concrete process of strategy development depends on the community/the local context. Special pitfalls and success factors, which should be taken into consideration.
