Documentary research: a technique for identifying problems in raising federal funds in the basic sanitation sector

Basic sanitation services in Brazil, especially sewage services, are deficient in most municipalities. This deficit is more critical in most small municipalities. As most municipalities in the State of Santa Catarina have less than 50,000 inhabitants, the provision of basic sanitation services is inadequate, mainly because these municipalities depend on federal resources to improve their basic sanitation services, considering that the use of resources is insufficient to supply the deficit of these services. Therefore, they submit project proposals to be analyzed by the National Health Foundation (FUNASA). Despite the availability of federal resources for these projects, many municipalities had difficulties in the procedures for this capture. Faced with this problem, this work identified the main impasses encountered by small municipalities in raising funds from the federal government with the aim of investing in sewage services. To this end, a case study was carried out with 8 municipalities in the mountainous region of Santa Catarina, which allowed, through the reading of the technical opinions issued by FUNASA, to conclude that the main problems faced by these municipalities, and which resulted in the non-approval of their projects, they are mainly associated with problems in delivering the documentation required for submission to technical analysis, the low technical quality of projects and the methodology and lack of standardization in FUNASA's analysis procedures.