The Reflections series synthesizes lessons from past evaluations to support organizational learning about what works and what doesn't. This paper examines past evaluations to provide six lessons from UNDP support to ensuring access to safe and clean water:

1. Strengthening citizens' participation in water governance increases revenues, accountability, and integrity in the water sector and is a mechanism to enhance access for vulnerable groups.
2. Improving the cost recovery of water delivery services benefits the end users, strengthens the system's sustainability, and frees it from reliance on external subsidies.
3. Water management benefits from decentralized implementation modalities with facilitators on the ground that help to contextualize and tailor programme design and implementation to local needs and practices.
4. Large and complex joint water programmes benefit from the aggregation of comparative strengths of UN agencies, bringing different methodologies and diverse counterparts to engage on a multidimensional issue.
5. Water governance that is agile and flexible for national and subnational implementation accelerates the achievement of SDG 6 targets.
6. Programme coherence between Integrated Water Resource Management and Water and Sanitation programmes creates positive synergies to improve the water sector