Self-supply of water and sanitation (also called household-led water supply or individual supply) refers to an approach of incremental improvements to water and sanitation services, which are mainly financed by the user. People around the world have been using this approach over centuries to incrementally upgrade their water and sanitation services. The approach does not refer to a specific technology or type of water source or sanitation service although it does have to be feasible to use and construct at a low cost and mostly using tools locally available. The approach is rather about an incremental improvement of these services. It is a market-based approach and commonly does not involve product subsidies.
"Self-supply" is different from "supported self-supply." The first term refers to situations where people improving their water and sanitation services on their own. "Supported self-supply" refers to a deliberately guided process, usually by a government agency or a non-governmental organization. Many examples of self-supply taking off in a short time come from situations where government-led service provision broke down (e.g., in countries of the former Soviet Union). The approach can also be deliberately used by government agencies or external support agencies to complement other types of service provision, such as community-managed water supply.
Self-supply is an important strategy - in combination with other approaches such as community-managed services - to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, particularly for Goal number 6: "Ensure access to water and sanitation for all".
The term is commonly used in the water sector in the development cooporation context, but less commonly in the sanitation sector. Certain approaches such as community-led total sanitation or container-based sanitation systems have many similar aspects to self-supply. Some organizations use other terms referring to approaches which are led by individual households. For example, the World Health Organization uses the term "individual supply". In the context of developed countries, a related concept is called living "off the grid".
Definition
The short definition of self-supply is: "People improving water and sanitation services by themselves". The basic idea of self-supply is that people are providing water for themselves through their own means without direct government support. Humans have been improving their own access to water and sanitation without government aid for millennia. As an approach to improving access it is a user-centered approach that involves incrementally improving current service levels, most of the time mainly financed by the end users. Generally this means that the improvements to water supply and sanitation are achieved either through labor by the end-users or by the end-users paying a technician or a company to complete the work. The incentives and benefits for the end users to improve their own water and sanitation services privately may include: convenience, proximity to home, larger volume of water, faster services than municipal water systems, cheaper than municipal water systems, lack of municipal water systems, privacy, security, and reliability.
There is no specific technology that is advocated with self-supply. Self-supply is rather an approach of how to improve access to water and sanitation services, commonly referred to as "moving up the water and sanitation ladders". At the bottom of the "water ladder" are unprotected sources of water. The users "climb the water ladder" by adding protection to their water source or additional technology for convenience. For example, a user with an unlined hand dug well with a rope and bucket as a lifting device would be at the bottom of the water ladder. A user with a lined hand dug well would be higher on the water ladder since the water source has a lower risk of contamination due to the lining. A user with a hand pump would have the benefit of being able to get a larger volume of water more quickly than with a bucket, and contamination of the source is reduced. Finally, a user with a motorized pump would have the convenience of not having to expend any manual energy on pumping water. Even sources on the lowest rungs of the ladder would provide service all day, every day, all year round.
In applying self-supply in sanitation, one approach used is that of sanitation marketing. Modularization is a part of the sanitation marketing approach. The sanitation product to be marketed is designed so that upgrades can be made gradually over time, towards an improved sanitation facility, as budget allows.