Project Name: Asia Pro Eco Project on Capacity Building for Enhancing Local Participation in Water Supply and Sanitation Interpenetrations in Poor Urban Areas
Name of Client: European Commission (EC)
Period: : March 2006 to February 2008 (24 Months)
Description of Project:
Most slum areas in Bangladesh suffer from very deficient sanitary conditions as water supply and sanitation access is very precarious; and polluted water bodies surround the high densely populated suburbs. Furthermore, eviction threatens the permanence of the settlements discouraging slum dwellers to invest in water supply and sanitation improvements. According to the Slum Mapping and Census, 2005, 61.1% of the slum clusters use municipal taps as their drinking water source, 37% use tube wells and 1.9% uses other sources such as rivers, ponds, lakes and canals. In most part of the clusters (95.6%), slums dwellers are compelled to share the available drinking water sources with other households. Among those clusters with municipal taps, 34.9% share the facility with more than 10 households and almost half of the clusters with tube wells also share the facility with more than 10 households.
Community participation appears as a promising pathway to move towards universal drinking water and sanitation access. Keeping this in mind, the project aimed to define strategies to maximize involvement of community in water supply and sanitation interventions in urban poor areas. Thus, the objective of the project was to find innovative approaches, best practices and decisive factors ensuring effective community participation. Main focus of the project was on urban poor where reinforcing local capacity was specially needed.
The project was designed to develop training courses. It was addressed to professionals of the water supply and sanitation sector dealing with capacity building and community participation including technical trainers, academia, government bodies, NGOs and grassroots organizations.
The project was aimed to learn from case studies conducted in Bangladesh and Nepal. Different types of urban settlements and participatory approaches were examined in order to create a broad bunch of models. Even though field work was conducted in Nepal and Bangladesh, most of the findings could be extrapolated to the rest of the region.