Best Practice Implementation Strategies of Community Based Village Hydro Power Projects for Sustainable Operation

Development partners of South Asian and African countries have identified off-grid hydro power project development as an important area of project financing. Standard practice of project execution cannot be adopted for community based projects due to their inherent nature of ensuring sustainability. This paper gives an insight into implementation modalities depending on the nature of the country and social structure of the community, which will help to formulate the best strategy for project implementation and financing, while ensuring the successful completion of the project and sustainable economy after commissioning of the project. Based on the success and failed stories in project implementation in Sri Lanka and Rwanda, authors have identified nine important variables as inputs to the model, and those variables will be given a numeric value after having done a thorough social survey of the village communities and the country as a whole. Depending on the significance of those variables, the derived values are multiplied by a scale factor and finally a cost function is obtained. Further the values are plotted in a spider network constructed from nine variables. The decision to adopt the best implementation model and financing mechanism can be decided by the final output of the cost function and template of the spider network formed by nine variables. Since such an exercise has never been attempted before, this paper will be a good start for further research, as success or failure of a big amount of fund disbursement for hundreds of community based projects in a country or a region highly depend on the modalities for project execution, measures for sustainability and financing mechanism.