As an example of community-scale multiple-use water services, the Southern Africa Development Community, supported by the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA), has piloted such an approach in seven communities in Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland and Zambia (where it was called ‘community-driven water resource management’). With this approach, a participatory process is facilitated in which communities make their own spatial assessments of all existing water resources, informal and formal technologies, and their uses and users. Problems are identified and a long-term vision is formulated of the desired water resources development and management situation in their community. This generates a number of options for short-term interventions. Then, representatives of all women and men, the poor, crop cultivators and cattle owners, irrigators and farmers of rainfed land, members of the traditional chiefs’ clans, and elected political party members in local government negotiate the ranking of these priorities. Activities are then selected within the available budget. After elaborating concrete action plans with price tags, the budget allocations are finalised and implemented.

The seven communities prioritised a wide range of interventions: new boreholes with hand pumps, rehabilitation of existing boreholes and wells (such as excavation), new construction and rehabilitation of cattle dams, rehabilitation of a dike in a flood plain for water retention, upgrading village reservoirs, a new weir in a hill stream, new irrigation schemes, improved toilets, piped water supplies to homesteads for multiple uses, electric boreholes for both homesteads and gardens, a communal solar pump and individual petrol pumps for field irrigation, invasive tree species eradication and commercialisation, market linkages and training in conservation agriculture.