Start with the discovery: Improving capacity factors analysis with the appreciative inquiry approach

Several decision-aid frameworks attempt to provide an optimal solution to the complex, challenging problem of delivering water supply and sanitation services to communities in need. However, a failure in proper needs assessment or handoff causes systemic failure of an installed system. Capacity factors analysis (CFA) is one such framework that focuses on personalized technology-specific alternative recommendations; and it faces similar challenges. While helpful in many ways, designers using CFA still make critical assumptions with regards to community´s expressed needs and only passively include the community members in the design process. Appreciative inquiry (AI) is introduced as a means to bridge this gap and increase community empowerment. The AI approach is a four-phase process: discovery, dream, design, and destiny. The process starts with asking community members about their strengths and capabilities, follows with their vision of the community, creates a space for collaborative design, and ends with implementation. A service-learning experience in Tshapasha is provided to demonstrate AI´s benefits. The results are compared to a CFA-focused study of Tshapasha from 2011.