• Neglect financial sustainability. A sound financial assessment and plan
is critical to sustainability at a project and programme level.
• Operation and maintenance or replacement of parts of RETs requires
working capital. An assessment of the beneficiaries’ capacity and
willingness to pay is important. For larger systems user tariffs may be
required to fund O&M; a local organization or enterprise should have the
capacity to collect a tariff and manage the funds. Awareness raising may
be required to communicate to people why tariffs are important.
• At a programme level, a sustainable financial model is required to enable
replication and up-scaling. Diversifying income streams to include product
sales can reduce the reliance on grants from donor agencies.
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