March is #WaterActionMonth!

Organizations around the world are coming together behind a common goal of keeping governments accountable to promises made with regards to providing safe water and sanitation to all.

To support them in this work, End Water Poverty is organizing exciting conversations to cover important aspects of water, sanitation, and hygiene. These webinars are open to the public, so please share these widely amongst your networks:

– Thursday March 16th; 3:30 PM GMT: “Realizing the Human Right to Water and Sanitation”
Register here: http://bit.do/WAM-webinar-HRTWS

– Thursday March 23rd; 3:30 PM GMT: “How to Finance an End to the Water and Sanitation Crisis”
Register here: http://bit.do/WAM-webinar-Finance

– Tuesday March 28th; 3:30 PM GMT: “How and Why to Involve Children and Youth in WASH Initiatives”
Register here: http://bit.do/WAM-webinar-Youth

Join the conversation this Water Action Month!

Can you spend too much on sanitation?

The decision to divert funding from water to sanitation turned sour when drought struck India.

Ledger. Uttarakhand, India. Photo: IRC

A budget tracking study in India revealed that the shift of policy focus from water to sanitation has resulted in a cut in government spending on rural water supply. This was a cause of concern because at the time of the study (August-December 2015) six of the seven states reviewed were reeling under severe drought.

A Parliamentary Standing Committee report released on 6 May 2016 stated that the government would be unable to achieve its 2017 target of providing 50% rural households with piped water. The media accused the government of starving the National Rural Drinking Water Programme of funds, while at the same time increasing funding for Prime Minister Modi’s flagship sanitation programme “Swachh Bharat”. The government has even introduced an additional 0.5% “Swachh Bharat” service tax.

The Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA) is presenting their budget tracking study on 26 July 2016 in Delhi as part of the WASH Dialogues series of events. WASH Dialogues are an initiative of IRC and TARU Leading Edge. CBGA’s presentation will focus on the institutional and procedural bottlenecks that are constraining public expenditure in the water and sanitation sector.

For more information on the event “Tracking policy and budgetary commitments for drinking water and sanitation in the new fiscal architecture in India” go the IRC Events page.

For more on budget tracking see:

• IRC – Quick guide to tracking finance
• Tracking WASH budgets: experiences from Bangladesh

This news item was originally published on the IRC website.

Global Sanitation Fund reports large-scale advances in sanitation and hygiene in 13 countries

Lucie Obiokang with the toilet she built after being triggered.

A new report shows that the Global Sanitation Fund (GSF) has supported governments and hundreds of their national partners in 13 countries, stretching from Cambodia to Senegal, to enable 7 million people in more than 20,500 communities to end open defecation.   

These results are published in the GSF’s latest Progress Report (link to report; link to photos), which highlights cumulative results from the start of the fund until the end of 2014. Nationally-led programmes supported by the GSF have enabled:

• 4.2 million people with improved toilets
• 7 million people and more than 20,500 communities to be open-defecation free
• 8 million people with handwashing facilities

Currently, 2.5 billion people, or 40% of the global population, lack access to decent sanitation. Of those, more than a billion defecate in the open. Diarrheal disease, largely caused by poor sanitation and hygiene, is a leading cause of malnutrition, stunting and child mortality, claiming nearly 600,000 under-5 lives every year. Inadequate facilities also affect education and economic productivity and impact the dignity and personal safety of women and girls.

Established by the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC), the GSF funds behaviour change activities to help large numbers of poor people in the hardest-to-reach areas attain safe sanitation and adopt good hygiene practices. These activities are community-led, support national efforts, and bring together a diverse group of stakeholders in order to address, at a large scale, the severe deficiencies in access to sanitation and hygiene.

The GSF is a pooled financing mechanism with the potential to further accelerate access to sanitation for hundreds of millions of people over the next 15 years. Between 2013 and 2014 alone, the GSF reported an almost 90 percent increase in the number of people living open-defecation free in target regions of 13 countries[1] across Africa and Asia. During this same period, the GSF has also supported a 55 percent increase in the number of people with access to improved toilets in those same areas. The United Nations system has identified global funds as an important tool to enable member countries to achieve their national development targets, including those for sanitation and hygiene.[2]

“These results prove that we are moving closer to our vision of a world where everybody has sustained sanitation and hygiene, supported by safe water,” said Chris Williams, Executive Director of WSSCC.  “This is a crucial step towards achieving better health, reducing poverty and ensuring environmental sustainability for the most marginalized people in the world.”

These GSF results have been achieved due to the work of more than 200 partners, including executing agencies and sub-grantees composed of representatives from governments, international organizations, academic institutions, the United Nations and civil society. One of the strongest success factors in the GSF approach is that it allows flexibility for countries to develop their programmes within the context of their own institutional framework and according to their own specific sanitation and hygiene needs, sector capacity and stakeholders. This implementation methodology is used to reach large numbers of households in a relatively short period of time and is vital for scaling up safe sanitation and hygiene practices.

“GSF is one of the few funds for government-led, donor-funded sanitation and hygiene programmes,” said Williams. “It can uniquely serve as a catalyst to the wider sector as a model that is replicable for others interested in large-scale behaviour change.”

Reaching scale has required that sub-grantees can identify influential, strategic communities, and make effective use of natural leaders, religious and local leaders, or hundreds of others who serve as individual sanitation and hygiene champions. GSF supported programmes apply a local delivery mechanism that engages households in thousands of villages, which enables people to make informed decisions about their sanitation and hygiene behaviour that can improve their health, education and productivity.

The report also highlights the GSF’s impact on national programmes. In Uganda, there are now more than 1.4 million people living in open-defecation free (ODF) environments, thanks to GSF-funded activities, and close to three million people have been reached by hygiene messages as a result of decentralized local government intervention. In Madagascar, over 1.3 million people are now living in ODF environments – in all 22 of the countries regions – and India’s GSF-supported programme has over 782,000 people with handwashing facilities.

“Access to improved sanitation has to be a sustainable reality for every person in the community, regardless of age, gender or disability, in order for the health and other benefits to be enjoyed by all,” said David Shimkus, Programme Director of the GSF. “This report shows that GSF-supported programmes are making major strides in achieving improved sanitation and hygiene for the most vulnerable, and all stakeholders will continue to work together to ensure such progress continues.”

The Governments of Australia, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom have contributed to the GSF since its establishment in 2008. Close to $105 million has been committed for 13 country programmes, which aim to reach 36 million people.

[1] Benin, Cambodia, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Nepal, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, Togo and Uganda.

[2] See draft outcome document for the forthcoming Addis Ababa Accord of the Third International Conference on Financing for Development, and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network Financing for Sustainable Development report and its Role of Global Funds in a Post-2015 Development Framework.

Public Finance for WASH initiative launched

Today sees the launch of Public Finance for WASH, a research and advocacy initiative aiming to increase awareness of domestic public finance and its critical importance for water and sanitation provision in low-income countries. Check out our website www.publicfinanceforwash.com.

This is a collaborative initiative between IRC, Water & Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP), and Trémolet Consulting. A key aim is to offer easy-to-read but rigorous information about domestic public finance solutions: our first three Finance Briefs are now available for download from our website, and over the coming year we will be building a comprehensive resource library.

And just to make sure we’re on the same page: what exactly is domestic public finance? Essentially, it’s money derived from domestic taxes, raised nationally (e.g. by the Kenyan government) or locally (e.g. by Nairobi’s municipal government). This money is going to be critical for achieving the water and sanitation SDGs: so how can we all work together to ensure that what we’re doing is supporting (not inhibiting) the development of effective public finance systems? And how can public finance be spent in ways that catalyse the development of dynamic markets for water and sanitation services?

To find out more, please check out the website. If you’d like to become involved in any way, get in touch!

THE URBAN PROGRAMMING GUIDE: How to design and implement a pro-poor urban WASH programme

Improving water, sanitation and hygiene services to low-income urban areas is a highly challenging and complex task. Traditional approaches have often failed to work. We need new approaches and fresh thinking. We need governments, donors and sector professionals genuinely committed to improving services in slum settlements. It’s challenging but it can be done! This guide offers some solutions based around WSUP’s experience: all you have to do is put them into practice!

The guide provides an introduction to urban WASH programming: how to design and implement a pro-poor urban water, sanitation and hygiene programme.

Who is this guide for?
This guide is primarily designed for WASH professionals working in governments, development agencies, funding agencies or civil society organisations. It will also be useful for professionals working for service providers including water utilities, local authorities and in the private sector.

How to use this guide
The guide provides an overview of some key strategies and service delivery models. It’s not intended to be encyclopaedic: it’s a rapid-reference document with the following intended uses:

• To aid the planning, design and implementation of urban WASH programmes.
• To assist with investment planning by service providers.
• To point the reader towards further sources of information and guidance.

The guide is free to download from WSUP’s website: http://www.wsup.com/resource/the-urban-programming-guide

WASHplus Weekly: Focus on Microfinance

Issue 128 January 3, 2014 | Focus on Microfinance

Many thanks to Blake McKinlay from iDE for suggesting the topic for this issue and for sharing an interesting study in Cambodia on determining the impact microfinance has on the uptake of latrines. Other resources include a just-published Water for the People review of its microfinance experiences in seven countries, a SHARE blog post on microfinance issues, and country studies from Ghana, Kenya, among others. 

REPORTS/WEBINARS

Understanding Willingness to Pay for Sanitary Latrines in Rural Cambodia: Findings from Four Field Experiments of iDE Cambodia’s Sanitation Marketing Program, 2013. N Shah, IDinsight. (Policy Brief) | (Complete Report) |
Given the low willingness to pay for latrines with cash, efforts to sell latrines at market price without any financing mechanism will lead to continued low penetration. The major implication of this study is that offering microfinance loans for latrines will dramatically increase uptake of latrines, while also making distribution significantly cheaper per latrine sold. Large-scale efforts to offer financing packages for latrines should be aggressively pursued in rural Cambodia and have the potential to increase latrine coverage from the current national rural level of 20 percent to 60 percent.

Evaluating the Potential of Microfinance for Sanitation in Tanzania, 2013. S Trémolet, SHARE. (Link)
Microfinance could be used in two main ways to promote access to sustainable sanitation services: by enabling households to spread out the costs of investing in household sanitation solutions (such as latrines and septic tanks), thereby improving the affordability of such investments and by supporting the development of a broad range of sanitation service providers, including masons, communal toilet block operators, or pit latrine emptiers.

Improved Sanitation and its Impact on Children: An Exploration of Sanergy, 2013. H Esper. (Link)
This child impact case study examines the positive impacts of improved sanitation on households and communities, using Sanergy’s experience in Kenya. This for-profit enterprise operates franchises in Nairobi’s slums and provides modular sanitation facilities and entrepreneurial training.

Market-Based Financing: WSP/RWSN Webinar Series, 2013. (Webinar) | (All Webinars) |
This webinar explores experiences with using local banks to provide commercial or semi-commercial loans for the construction, expansion, and major rehabilitation of rural and small town water schemes, using cases from Kenya and Uganda.

Microfinance as a Potential Catalyst for Improved Sanitation: A Synthesis of Water for People’s Sanitation Lending Experiences in Seven Countries, 2013. C Chatterley, Water For People. (Link)
To learn how best to facilitate sanitation microfinance, Water for People has been piloting various lending models with diverse partners in seven countries (Bolivia, Guatemala, India, Malawi, Peru, Rwanda, and Uganda). This report aims to synthesize these experiences to inform general guidance for initiating and improving programs, providing lessons learned and recommendations.

Global Sanitation Fund in Malawi

Global Sanitation Fund in Malawi, by Rochelle Holm, Ph.D., PMP, Mzuzu University, Centre of Excellence in Water and Sanitation and SMART Centre Manager. Email: rochelledh@hotmail.com.

• Global Sanitation Fund in Malawi Website

The Global Sanitation Fund programme in Malawi is aimed at implementing sanitation and hygiene initiatives that will help the Government of Malawi to attain its vision of ensuring Sanitation for All in the country and its mission of ensuring that all Malawians access improved sanitation facilities, practice safe hygiene and re-use or recycle waste for the sustainable management of the environment and socio-economic development.  

The programme will help in reducing Malawi’s open defecation which the JMP 2013 Update (World Health Organization and UNICEF) estimates to stand at 7% in 2011. This reduction in open defecation will be achieved through:

• triggering 3,600 villages and 274 schools in the six districts using Community Led Total Sanitation and School Led Total Sanitation approaches, respectively, and promoting the adoption of improved sanitation and hygiene practices;
• conducting sanitation marketing in support of the triggering;
• developing the capacity of government, civil society organizations and private sector actors in hygiene and sanitation promotion;
• supporting the planning and implementation of sanitation and hygiene activities at district level;
• documenting lessons learnt to help improve programming in sanitation and hygiene.

Microfinance as a potential cataylst for improved sanitation

. Summary of sanitation lending and product delivery models. Water for People

Microfinance allows middle- and lower-income households to invest in desirable sanitation products, so that public funding can be freed up to reach the poorest, according to Water for People (WfP). In a new report [1], WfP reviews their experiences in piloting various lending models in seven countries: Bolivia, Guatemala, India, Malawi, Peru, Rwanda and Uganda.

The report provides lessons and recommendations for donors wishing to engage in sanitation microfinancing. The four key recommendations are:

1. Think like a business
2. Support lending institutions based on the microfinance climate and capacity needs
3. Build an autonomous sanitation microfinance market
4. Track progress and lessons

The report is part of WfP’s Sanitation as a Business (SaaB) program, funded by a Gates Foundation grant.

Read the full report

[1]  Chatterley, C. et al, 2013. Microfinance as a potential catalyst for improved sanitation : a synthesis of Water For People’s sanitation lending experiences in seven countries. Denver, CO,USA: Water For People. Available at: <http://www.waterforpeople.org/assets/files/sanitation-microfinance.pdf>

Source: Christie Chatterley et al., Microfinance as a potential cataylst for improved sanitation, Water for People, 27 Dec 2013

A Market Led, Evidence Based Approach to Rural Sanitation

Monitor Inclusive Markets, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has written a white paper titled “A Market Led, Evidence Based Approach to Rural Sanitation” on supply side market-based approaches to scale rural sanitation in India, based mainly on findings from the PSI-led “Supporting Sustainable Sanitation Improvements” (3SI) project in Bihar and supplemented by additional investigation of interventions in other parts of India.

• Full text, pdf  

The white paper explains that demand for toilets does exist in rural India, and the availability of quality and affordable products as well as financing are key levers to unlocking this demand. It goes on to propose business models that could profitably deliver solutions that meet customer needs, and highlights players in the sanitation ecosystem who could serve as the “market maker,” conducting market-building activities and creating an enabling environment for growth.

Please visit www.inclusive-markets.org/sanitation to see a more complete set of outputs from the 3SI project as well as annexures to the white paper providing overviews of some organizations already delivering sanitation solutions or providing sanitation financing in rural India.

Campaign uses “Slum Britain art” for fundraising

Slums encroach on Buckingham Palace – still from Practical Action video

A UK charity has set images of iconic landmarks like Buckingham Palace in typical South Asian slums for its latest campaign to tackle urban poverty. Practical Action’s Safer Cities Christmas appeal aims to provide clean water, sanitation and safe housing to over 4,000 poor people in Nepal and Bangladesh. The appeal is backed by the government’s UK Aid Match initiative which matches public donations pound for pound. UK Aid Match will award up to £120 million (US$ 200 million) in grants over 3 years.

Source: Practical Action, 20 Dec 2013 ; The Independent, 22 Dec 2013