Comparative Study of Maintenance Planning and Failure Modes of Drinking Water Projects: Case Studies from Eastern Uganda

In a rush to attain the Sustainable Development Goal 6 (clean drinking water and sanitation), many technology-based water and sanitation projects lack a long-term maintenance program, particularly when the organization initiating and/or sponsoring the project is not located near the implementation site. Since 2015, Burleson (lead author) conducted three field study efforts on community drinking water projects in Eastern Uganda. In the field, Burleson observed the consequences of both good and bad maintenance programs in drinking water projects, underpinning the importance of maintenance programming at the outset of the project. Additionally, Uganda's water supply strategy of decentralization with an emphasis on stakeholder engagement across public, private, and community-based entities is presented and analyzed, of which only one of the three Ugandan projects discussed in this paper appears to comply with. The other two projects did not follow the country's multi-stakeholder framework, nor did they incorporate sufficient long-term sustainability plans and thus the projects were terminated by default. The third Ugandan project did incorporate long-term sustainability planning from the outset and was still operational three years after inception. We discuss the success or lack thereof for these three case studies with respect to the aspects listed above within a framework of assessing failure modes, including a particular focus on planning for maintainability. We will compare the failure modes of these three projects to four other water development projects in the literature, and will relate the impact of such planning to observe its project termination or longevity.