The sustainable management of water quality has policy, technical, institutional and financial components. In many developing countries 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, and institutional inertia or competition is eliminated. For example, the present state of many national data programs, for which there are no clear data objectives and no defined users of the data, represents an expensive failure of national policy.