IHUWASH Accelerator India seeks high impact urban WASH innovations

The IHUWASH Accelerator India program identifies and supports high-impact WASH business innovations to work with the city governments of Faridabad, Udaipur and Mysuru to solve pressing urban WASH problems.  Submissions should focus on one or more of the following urban WASH innovations:

1. Safe drinking water
2. Last-mile water distribution
3. Recovering water supply costs
4. Decentralised and improved sanitation solutions
5. Improving public/community toilets
6. Sustainable faecal waste treatment
7. Hygiene behaviour change

Benefits for the selected innovations include opportunities to:

• Roll out small-scale pilots that demonstrate your WASH innovation to governments
• Work directly with key government officials, sector experts and impact investors
• Showcase your innovation through a high visibility nation-wide program
• Raise funds from private sector companies and impact investors

More program details are available here. Applications for the program are now open and they close on 22nd Jan 2018.

Please apply to the program (or) help identify relevant WASH business innovations by nominating them to chandrakant.komaragiri@ennovent.com.

About IHUWASH:

IHUWASH is a collaborative initiative between NIUA, Taru, IRC and Ennovent. The three year project is supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and aims to improve the performance of urban WASH programs for India within a collaborative framework. Under IHUWASH, national and city-level Innovation Hubs are being established to work closely with the Faridabad, Mysuru and Udaipur city governments along with other national level WASH stakeholders.

The IHUWASH Accelerator builds on the experience of the 2016 Sanitation Innovation Accelerator in which Taru, IRC and Ennovent were also involved.

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.

Monitoring Africa’s sanitation commitments

IRC helps AMCOW develop a new process to monitor the N’gor declaration

At the 2016 Africa Water Week, civil society called on the African Ministers’ Council on Water (AMCOW) to honour the region’s commitments on water, sanitation and hygiene, including those agreed in the 2015 N’gor declaration. The four partner organisations in Watershed – empowering citizens, Akvo, IRC, Simavi and Wetlands International, were among those that endorsed the collective statement submitted to AMCOW by the African Network for Water (ANEW).

Progress especially on sanitation has so far been poor; only 4% between from 2000 to 2015, according to Al-hassan Adam from End Water Poverty. A recent IRC/WSUP finance brief stated that only eight African countries provide data on sanitation expenditure. All of them are falling behind on their N’gor declaration commitment to spend 0.5% of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on sanitation. Exerting pressure to speed up progress on sanitation is an obvious task for those civil society organisations (CSOs) that Watershed aims to support.

Next to lobbying AMCOW to honour its sanitation commitments, IRC is also advising the ministerial council on the development of a new process to monitor the N’gor declaration. The aim of the new monitoring process is to create reflective dialogue processes at country and subregional levels and strengthen mechanisms for accountability to citizens and political leaders informed by evidence.

So far a Regional Action Plan has been developed, and indicators and scoring criteria have been reviewed through a series of sub-regional consultations led by AMCOW in Nairobi, Dakar and Johannesburg in May and June 2016. See below an example of an indicator with scoring criteria.

For more information, read the background paper prepared by Alana Potter.

This news item was originally published on the IRC website.

WASH 2016 Conference – Pathways to universal and sustained water, sanitation and hygiene – abstracts now open

WASH 2016 Conference – Pathways to universal and sustained water, sanitation and hygiene, May 16-20, 2016, Brisbane, Australia.

• WASH conference 2016 – abstracts now open

The future of action on WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) looks positive – with the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals global agenda maintaining attention on the need for water, sanitation and hygiene for everyone, all the time. But the path to achieving this global agenda requires new ways of thinking. 

How can all WASH actors – governments, private sectors and civil society – work together to ensure WASH, whether at community-scales or larger institutional-scales, to achieve not only sustained access for everyone, but also health, well-being, environmental and economic outcomes for societies?

This and many more questions will be explored at the WASH 2016 conference in Brisbane, Australia 16-20 May, 2016.

Abstracts (oral, poster and training program) are now accepted for the two-day conference and the three-day training program.

Abstracts are welcome in the following categories:

• Improving WASH service levels and service sustainability
• Moving WASH beyond the household
• Integrating hygiene to ensure health outcomes
• WASH and water security

Conference website

• Submit your abstract
• Register now (group discounts available)
• Contact us

A toilet for 66 million people in rural Bangladesh

BRAC staff member on a household visit

In Bangladesh, the largest NGO in the world BRAC is working its way up to help the country to get proper sanitation. It has reached more than half of the population since the start 9 years ago. It is one of the world’s largest sanitation implementation programmes. IRC works with BRAC to make it happen. In this interview, IRC sanitation expert Ingeborg Krukkert tells her story about her work in Bangladesh. ”

Bangladesh is well on track to meet the Sustainable Development Goals in 2030,” says Ingeborg Krukkert in IRC’s headquarters in The Hague. “This is undeniably due to BRAC because it’s serving half of the country. Bangladesh is a good example for others on how to achieve so much in such a short time. It is proof that change is possible.”

IRC’s Sanitation and hygiene specialist for Asia, Ingeborg Krukkert, travels to Bangladesh every two months to work with BRAC. Working on hygiene promotion and behavior change, she complements BRAC’s groundbreaking programme with IRC’s monitoring system to measure and enhance the true impact in sanitation and hygiene.

#MenstruationMatters in Bangladeshi schools

28 May is Menstrual Hygiene Day. In Bangladesh, BRAC field staff are working hard to “end the hesitation around menstruation” especially in schools.

BRAC staff member (left) from Jessore district with sanitary napkins for schools. Photo: Petra Brussee/IRC

Field staff of BRAC WASH in Bangladesh talk just as easily about menstrual hygiene as they do about water seals for toilets or hand pumps. At community level menstrual hygiene messages are included in the programme for adolescent girls and young women. Since 2006 about 45 million community cluster meetings have been organised.

In rural areas rags are used by women who cannot afford sanitary napkins. Field staff discuss menstrual hygiene with adolescent girls and young women, for example on how to wash rags with soap and dry them in the sun. They are also encouraged to speak up about menstrual hygiene says Abu Taleb Biswas of BRAC WASH in Hygiene Promotion – the backbone of BRAC WASH: “Women and adolescent girls learn to speak up about menstrual hygiene issues, something that was nearly unthinkable even a few years ago.”

World Toilet Day: cities can’t wait

On World Toilet Day, IRC presents its ideas how to ‘systemically change sanitation in cities’. A new working paper marks one of the first steps in finding answers on how to reform a sanitation sector, which is failing a large part of the urban population.

Convergence of human and solid waste in a stormwater drain in Mumbai, India (Photo by Giacomo Galli/ IRC).

While more people in cities have access to toilets than in villages, both wastewater and solid waste remains largely untreated. Take Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh: 99 percent of the population use toilets but according to Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) a staggering 98 percent of their waste is dumped untreated in the enviroment [1].

On World Toilet Day, IRC presents its ideas how to tackle sanitation in cities. A new working paper “Towards Systemic Change in Urban Sanitation“, marks one of the first steps in finding answers on how to reform a sanitation sector, which is failing a large part of the urban population. The problems in urban sanitation range from lack of facilities to lack of public funding and messy politics in urban governance.The root causes are systemic and technology alone is not the solution.

Female parliamentarians want free sanitary pads for Uganda’s schoolgirls

Uganda’s female parliamentarians led by controversial Speaker of Parliament Hon. Rebecca Kadaga have called on the government to provide sanitary pads for all schoolgirls in the Universal Primary Education (UPE) programme. Kadaga launched her call at the Annual General Meeting  of the Uganda Women Parliamentary Association (UWOPA) on 16 May 2014.

The call was spurred by IRC’s research with SNV in Ugandan schools, which showed there is a higher likelihood of adolescent girls staying home during their periods. Girls in the 140 schools surveyed reported missing from 8 to 24 school days per year, resulting in lagging behind or some dropping out of school.

In August this year, IRC will present results from the Uganda study at the Menstrual Hygiene Management Conference taking place in Kampala, Uganda. NETWAS Uganda and partners are organising this event to encourage learning about what can be done to improve menstrual management in schools, institutions and communities.

Source:

• Marielle Snel and Carmen da Silva Wells, Why focus on menstrual hygiene management?, IRC,, 27 May 2013
• Olive Eyotaru, Include girls’ sanitary pads in UPE pack, Kadaga says, Daily Monitor, 18 May 2014
• Editorial, Support low-cost sanitary pad drive, Daily Monitor, 20 May 2014
• Support Uganda’s low-cost sanitary pad drive, SNV Uganda, 23 May 2014

DFID pledges €28 million to SNV for multi-country sanitation programme

More funding for a local government-led approach introduced in 2008 by SNV and IRC to scale up sanitation from community to district level.

The UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) has awarded SNV Netherlands Development Organisation a €28 million (US$ 32 million) service contract to fund the Sustainable Sanitation & Hygiene for All (SSH4A) Results Programme. Introduced by SNV and IRC in 2008 in Nepal, Bhutan, Cambodia, Viet Nam and Laos, SSH4A is a comprehensive, local government-led approach to scale up sanitation from community to district level.

With funding from the DFID Results Fund, the SSH4A Results Programme will provide improved sanitation to more than 2 million people in nine countries: Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Nepal, South Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. The programme will also reach out to over 2.7 million people with hygiene promotion, make 1,200 communities Open Defecation Free (ODF), ensure that 400,000 people practice hand washing with soap at critical times, assist the preparation of district sanitation plans and improve local governments’ capacity for steering improved sanitation.

SSH4A programmes have been implemented with rural communities in 15 countries across Asia and Africa. In Asia, more than 2.2 million rural people have been reached, of whom 700,000 received improved sanitation.

More information:

• IRC – Sustainable Sanitation and Hygiene for All
• SNV – Sustainable Sanitation & Hygiene for All Results Programme

 

Source: SNV, 28 Apr 2014

IRC showcasing WASHCost Calculator at Reinvent the Toilet Fair: India

IRC’s WASHCost Project will be one of approximately 50 exhibits that will be on display during the two-day Reinvent the Toilet Fair: India. IRC will present the WASHCost Calculator; an online tool that helps professionals to plan for WASH services that are built to last.

The Reinvent the Toilet Fair: India is being co-hosted by the Government of India’s Department of Biotechnology and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It will coincide with World Water Day on March 22, 2014. The fair is also supported by the Indian Ministry of Urban Development.

In 2011, the Gates Foundation launched the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge (RTTC)  to develop toilets without connections to sewer, electrical, or water systems. Sixteen of those prototypes will be on display in India.

The WASHCost Calculator takes into account everything from construction, finance, and installation, to maintenance, repairs and eventual replacement. It raises issues such as who owns the infrastructure or who is responsible for replacement. It helps you to think about how you are going to maintain the service before you’re trying to build it. The online tool is designed to compare data across organisations and is dynamically updated, growing smarter with each additional project. And the tool is now online at:  http://washcost.ircwash.org

IRC has created a poster, which gives an example of how the WASHCost Calculator can be used for rural sanitation in India.

Source:

• IRC selected as an exhibitor for the Reinvent the Toilet Fair: India, IRC, 20 Mar 2014
• Girindre Beeharry and K. VijayRaghavan, Reinvent the Toilet Fair: India – Solutions for India and the World, Impatient Optimists, 10 Mar 2014