Sanitation Promotion in Bolivia - Building Human Capacity, Not Just Latrines
November 20, 2008
By Kate Fogelberg
The global sanitation problem is overwhelming to think about -- how do we, as a global community of NGOs, governments, and private sector, create demand, finance, and support the uptake of improved sanitation worldwide? Not only that, but how do we know that people continue to use these facilities for their intended use after interventions end? The answer lies not in simply more money or more latrines, but better trained local personnel equipped with a toolbox of sanitation solutions to meet the diverse needs and demands of the populations currently lacking such a basic service.
Thanks to the generous contributions of the John H. Ware, Jr. Foundation, Water For People has sponsored the Ware Fellowship for the past four years. The program aims to strengthen the pool of water and wastewater professionals in the countries where Water For People works. After three years of bringing fellows to the United States for intensive three-month training, an evaluation with past fellows in 2007 led to a restructuring of the program for 2008. The main changes included hosting the fellowship in-country, directly targeting Water For People staff and partners, and strategically linking the goals of the fellowship program to the goals of Water For People. The overall goals of the fellowship are the following:
- Building implementation skills of Water For People staff and partners
- Increasing water and sanitation coverage
- Increasing sector coordination
- Demonstrating a development model
The revised fellowship is being implemented in South America this year. At the end of 2007, during an evaluation of work that year, partners identified several areas in which they would like to improve their knowledge and skills. Several themes were identified -- from sanitation to Integrated Water Resources Management to conflict resolution.
Because 2008 had been designated the International Year of Sanitation by the United Nations and because Bolivia is one of the few Latin American countries not on track to meet the sanitation Millennium Development Goals, it made sense to focus on sanitation with the fellowship program. Fellows met in May, 2008, to collectively decide which topics they would like to learn about. Hosting the trainings in-country has allowed for more people to participate. We have 35 fellows this year taking part in the program. An unexpected outcome has been the high level of participation and interest of the local government partners. Their participation is particularly important as they are responsible for funding basic sanitation infrastructure, creating local policies around types of facilities and delegating responsibilities for management of public facilities. The interest in new sanitation approaches has been overwhelmingly positive.
At the initial meeting in May, fellows decided that they really wanted to understand what the sanitation situation was in their areas of work before deciding how to change their programming. So the first component of the Fellowship is action research-investigating a problem and deciding on a course of action for improvement. Water For People listened and did an intensive study this past July, visiting a sample of communities in each municipality. The results were quite interesting-most people simply do not value improved sanitation. When people listed their needs and wants, sanitation rarely enters the top five. Another interesting exercise had children and adults draw their homes, and select the places they liked best and least. Schoolchildren nearly always selected the latrine as their least favorite place, and household interviewees did not include latrines as part of their household drawings. Consistent with similar studies around the world, the people who are interested in acquiring a latrine, or who already have one, are motivated not by their individual or public health, but of convenience, privacy, and status.
Equipped with an up-to-date, deep understanding of the sanitation situation in their municipalities, our partners are now participating in developing a sanitation strategy that will lead to quicker and more extended coverage, and most importantly, continued hygienic use of the units. Components of this strategy will most likely include a much more in-depth generation of demand phase, using communications outlets and location-specific messages to convince people of the benefits of improved sanitation based on why latrines are important to them-convenience, privacy, and status. Following an improved demand-generation, our partners will be able to offer more technical options to interested community members.
Several fellows recently traveled to a 2-week training session in ecological sanitation in Mexico, another one is off to an ecological training in Honduras, and several more are coming to Peru in November to learn about other options. Successful sanitation programs listen to what customers (or beneficiaries) want, and provide them with that product; they don't just provide one type of model that may or may not meet the needs and expectations of every person.
One of the activities of the past fellowships that fellows found particularly useful was attending AWWA's Annual Conference and Exposition, as it was a great place to network and learn about what was going on in the sector. One fellow was able to participate in this year's ACE conference, and we are planning on bringing the most innovative group of fellows to WEFTEC's 2009 conference to share some of the results from their training and how they are implementing improved sanitation programs.
As I was walking through the village of Ura Yana Rumi, Cuchumuela, Bolivia, last month with Erlinda Jimenez, the Municipal employee responsible for training and a Ware fellow, she looked me straight in the eye and said:
"I have worked for so many organizations and none of them takes people, and our abilities, so seriously as Water For People. Other organizations talk about trainings, and may have one or two, but Water For People doesn't just talk. They do what they say they are doing to do."
Water For People's core principles -believing in people, keeping it local, keeping good company, and keeping our promises-are put into practice through programs like the Ware Fellowship, that are allowing us to change the world, not one toilet at a time, but one toilet expert at a time.
What do you think?
