Context

Current Status of FCAS

Context Situation

With the ultimate goal of advancing the achievement of human rights to water and sanitation, the Fund has been working in Latin America and the Caribbean for thirteen years, where it has established itself as a leading donor. To date, the FCAS has implemented 81 programmes in 18 countries, maintaining a privileged dialogue with partner countries and other local, regional and international actors. The interventions carried out by the FCAS respond to the proposals made by the partner countries themselves, are aligned with their development goals and the implementation of the programmes is carried out by local institutions, always with the technical support of the Water Fund.

The programmes carried out with the Water Fund’s funding are of different types:

Initially, programmes were fully funded by the Fund and the recipient country (where the local contribution depended on the country’s level of development and could be between 20% and 50% of the total programme budget, except in some exceptional cases, where the FCAS funded the entire programme). These are further divided into two types:
- Those managed directly by the Fund, which are referred to as Bilateral Programmes (identified by the letter “B” throughout this Report). They account for 50.5% of the total portfolio, have been allocated 403.713 million euros in funding and are divided into 62 programmes, of which 34 were completed by December 2021. Another 24 are currently under implementation and 4 more are in the design process.
- Programmes that are carried out in collaboration with the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) and are referred to as Multilateral Programmes (identified as “M”). They account for 49.5% of the Fund’s total donation and cover 19 programmes (15 of them completed by December 2021). In addition to these programmes, a percentage of the funding managed by the IADB was implemented in the form of “technical cooperation”, which are smaller projects, executed by the IADB and without an infrastructure component, which were subsequently implemented to influence various technical aspects of the programmes and help make them sustainable (see Section Technical cooperations)
In recent years, a number of Delegated Cooperation programmes were also initiated, which rely on donations that the European Union entrusts to its member countries to carry out cooperation actions. This participation takes place through two instruments: the Latin America Investment Facility (LAIF) and the Development Cooperation Instrument (DCI). In these programmes, the FCAS often provides additional funding to focus on very specific aspects, for example, extending programmes to the most remote populations or strengthening the human rights approach.

Overall Data

Until 2021, the Cooperation Fund for Water and Sanitation (Water Fund) has donated 799 million euros, attracting 801 million euros from local and other funders as a counterpart to implement the programmes. This amounts to a total portfolio of 1.6 billion euros.

The portfolio has preferentially targeted rural or peri-urban areas in the most fragile countries or regions with high vulnerability. By country, Haiti has received the most donations (almost 120 million euros), followed by Bolivia (95.7 million euros) and Paraguay (71.3 million euros). In addition to this, the European Union has provided funds: the FCAS programmes were used to raise delegated cooperation funds amounting to 130 million euros which, in turn, promote global programmes for a total amount of more than 705 million euros.

The Fund’s actions cover several lines of action:

Supporting the provision of services and infrastructure to ensure access to water and sanitation.
Contributing to the establishment of efficient, transparent and participatory management systems.
Promoting institutional strengthening in recipient countries to encourage the implementation of public policies that ensure the sustainability of water resources.
Promoting the generation and management of knowledge by collecting experiences and lessons learned to generate resources to improve integrated water management that can be useful both in other Fund programmes and in external projects managed directly by the countries.

Originally, the Fund’s interventions were mainly focused on promoting access to water and sanitation; however, it now focuses on broader operations, with a greater emphasis on strengthening and assisting in the development of public policies to improve water planning and the performance of water operators. In this regard, in 2021, the Fund has worked intensively on four aspects: a) institutional strengthening and support to service operators; b) boosting the sanitation sector and wastewater policy through institutional strengthening tools; c) developing strategic actions in the framework of hydrological planning and Integrated Water Resources Management, favouring adaptation to climate change, and d) the human rights approach.

On the other hand, the Water Fund has gone from carrying out individual actions to becoming an intermediary of other actors, articulating the intervention of different funding instruments, incorporating the technical cooperation of Spanish public institutions and fostering the leveraging of funds to prioritise the water agenda.

Project List

Multilateral and bilateral programs and their phases (Spanish)

In addition to these programs, various technical cooperations have been launched with the aim of promoting the sustainability of the actions carried out and systematizing the knowledge learned.

See Technical Cooperations

Results

Financial Performance

Programme Status

The Great Fund