In Africa, restricted funding is usually combined with fragile or unstable institutions and limited technical capabilities to deal with an expanding range of water quality problems. Therefore, there needs to be a priority on establishing a coherent and realistic national policy response to water quality management so that limited funds and strengthening of capacity are strategically focused on essential issues. For example, the present state of many national data programmes, for which there are no clear data objectives and no defined users of the data, represents an expensive failure of national policy. At the technical level, there has been great progress in developing more cost-effective monitoring and analytical protocols, especially in the development of field kits and in the use of toxicologically based approaches for determining public health and environmental health impacts. Technical advances will be more or less applicable depending on the degree of national development and institutional stability.
Financial sustainability is a vexed issue in the African context.
It also depends on management and business skills at the laboratory level and on fiscal policies and accountabilities at the state level that permit earnings retention and reinvestment. Experience suggests that redesign of national data programmes, including technical, institutional and legal components, is an effective first step to achieving cost-efficiency. This paper is available in an electronic format.