Capitalisation of Experience (CapEx) from Swiss engagement in WASH in Mozambique 2009-2025
Location
Country-wide, Mozambique
project period
March – May 2025
client
SDC – Embassy of Switzerland in Mozambique
Services provided
Partner organisation
Switzerland’s commitment to better and more equitable decentralised basic WASH services in Mozambique started in 1982 with its support for a water supply project in the province of Cabo Delgado. Over the following three decades, the focus of the intervention was on improving drinking water supply and storage across the province, and on assisting the National Water Directorate in training water technicians. Since 2019, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) supported several large-scale, long-term WASH-related programmes in the three northern provinces with a total investment of around CHF 90 million. Furthermore, from 2019, Swiss Humanitarian Aid (SHA) has responded to different WASH emergencies caused by the conflict in Northern Mozambique, cholera pandemic, and various cyclones. The placement of a humanitarian coordinator also led to launching various longer-term water-related measures in response and preparedness to such recurring hazards. Given that the remaining WASH-related programmes will end mid-2026 with likely mixed results, and given the ongoing design phase of the new Swiss Cooperation Programme 2026-29, a CapEx aimed to take stock of past experiences and highlight possible future strategic directions.
SDC uses capitalisation of experiences to identify successful practices, find out what works well, learn from challenges, and improve future interventions. Against this backdrop, the CapEx WASH study carried out by Skat Consulting was set up as a stocktaking cum forward-looking exercise with the overarching aim to:
- Extract key results, good practices, and lessons learned from SDC’s WASH-related portfolio (in de-elopement cooperation and humanitarian aid) over the past 15 years;
- Assess Switzerland’s influence and added value on systemic changes, reforms, and legal/regulatory framework developments in the WASH sector;
- Provide strategic recommendations for realigning sector-related interventions in SDC’s Cooperation Programme 2026-29 and beyond.
The CapEx combined a range of methods as part of a progressive knowledge accumulation and processing based on a documentation study and stakeholder consultation. The process encompassed concomitantly a:
- Comprehensive desk review of relevant reports (both project and sector related);
- Large range of online and in-person interviews in Maputo with key informants (from SDC, implementing agencies, governmental institutions, other development partners and WASH sector organisations);
- Field visit to northern Mozambique (Cabo Delgado) to interact with selected key informants and sector stakeholders, service providers and recipients of the interventions at provincial, district and local level;
- Qualitative analysis of the collected information, focusing on key success and challenge factors, lessons learnt and potential ways forward;
- Stakeholder workshop on initial findings and recommendations designed, facilitated and documented by the consultant team at the end of its in-country work;
- Study report as the product compiling all the elements developed during the consultancy, including an additional proposal for further documentation and dissemination of the lessons learned.