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Empowering rural communities to sustain clean water and improve hygiene through self-help groups

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conference contribution
posted on 2018-11-13, 09:05 authored by Chris Prottas, Angelique Dioguardi, Sarah Aguti
Traditional water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) approaches have failed to achieve adequate sustainability of rural water points and hygiene behaviour change. Community-based savings groups have several strengths that suggest their integration into WASH programs may significantly improve sustainability and hygiene and sanitation. This paper documents how The Water Trust integrated the formation of savings groups, referred to as “self-help groups” (SHGs), into its program. This paper shares year-one results of an 18-month pilot implemented across 18 communities, including indicators of sustainability, SHG performance, hygiene and sanitation, and health. Notably, annual water point contributions spent or available for repairs increased from $2 to $164 in SHG communities, more than three-times the levels of contemporaneous pilots and more than needed for annual maintenance and repairs. Handwashing facility coverage also increased from 5% to 36%. Learnings from the pilot are shared along with a discussion of the potential for scale and future research.

History

School

  • Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering

Research Unit

  • Water, Engineering and Development Centre (WEDC)

Published in

Transformation towards sustainable and resilient WASH services: Proceedings of the 41st WEDC International Conference

Pages

? - ? (6)

Citation

PROTTAS, C., DIOGUARDI, A. and AGUTI, S., 2018. Empowering rural communities to sustain clean water and improve hygiene through self-help groups. IN: Shaw, R.J. (ed). Transformation towards sustainable and resilient WASH services: Proceedings of the 41st WEDC International Conference, Nakuru, Kenya, 9-13 July 2018, Paper 3030, 6 pp.

Publisher

© WEDC, Loughborough University

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2018

Notes

This is a conference paper.

Language

  • en

Location

Nakuru, Kenya

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    WEDC 41st International Conference

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