Arghyam’s partnership with Utthan began in 2008 for  sustainable capacity building and developing an institutional mechanism at the state level for safe water and sanitation across 21 villages in the state of Gujarat. Importance was given to the gender sensitivity in sanitation.

This project was a sub-set of that larger project. Here, Utthan engaged intensely with four villages to make them open defecation free. Apart from the incentive provided by the sanitation scheme, funds were also leveraged from SHGs and banks. These pilots aimed to influence the villages in the surrounding areas and promote widespread implementation of total sanitation.

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People’s Learning Centre (PLC) for water and sanitation was set up to share and disseminate learning and expertise of Utthan’s team.  The PLC (People’s Resource and Learning Centre for Water and Sanitation), in collaboration with WASMO and Arghyam has focused upon capacity building of different groups at various levels, specifically on water and sanitation. This resulted in village communities becoming self-reliant and self-sustaining as far as water and sanitation are concerned. The central idea of this project was to develop and build the capacity of institutional mechanisms for water and sanitation facilities which are people centred, gender sensitive and demonstrative. This was done by:

• Creating a resource group model where the group at the community level (Area Resource Group) would be supported by District and State level resource groups. The Area Resource Groups helped communities gain access to Watsan facilities and derived support from the district and state level groups.
• Promoting sustainable and appropriate sanitation technologies such as Ecosan.
• Identification of supplementary credit sources such as micro-finance for sanitation.

In this project, Utthan engaged in collaborative capacity building by creating networks at state, district and panchayat levels. This helped provide water security and facilitated credit linkages for sanitation promotion.

The post Capacity building to increase gender sensitive, people centered, safe drinking water and sanitation programme in rural Gujarat (Phase I) appeared first on Arghyam.

In Phase I of this project, Utthan engaged in a collaborative capacity building at the state, district and Panchayat levels, to access water resources, facilitated linkages between banks and women federations for safe sanitation, and demonstrated model villages. The findings from this project and Utthan’s vast experience show that the changes in the lives of the most vulnerable communities cannot come about through isolated inputs on a single issue. Thus, this new phase of support is envisaged for the People’s Learning Centre in order to redefine the roles of stakeholders, from communities to civil society to government.

This project will enable these stakeholders to recognize their basic rights and responsibilities to have access to safe, adequate, equitable, and sustainable drinking water supplies and affordable sanitation facilities for hygiene promotion. It will lead them towards self-reliance through gender-equal, just, participatory, and community-owned systems.

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