Mobilising, Facilitating and Replicating Socially Inclusive WASH Initiatives in India’s Urban Slums

• Geography: Bhubaneswar, Jaipur
• Supported by: Water for Women -Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Government of Australia
• Focus: Inclusive WASH

About the project: The five-year-project aims to strengthen collaboration between community, civil society networks, local authorities, service providers and national stakeholders to build a consensus on design, planning and delivery of WASH services, within a shared framework of rights and responsibility. This is being done through a composite community-government-private sector mechanism for mobilising demand and bettering governance for equitable sanitation services through the Single Window, and linking this to innovative solutions that are both community-friendly and scalable.

The fours key outcomes are : strengthen WASH inclusion, response and implementation at a local (Ward) level, achieve inclusion of marginalised communities through understanding the needs, building awareness, empowering change agents to strengthen robust public service and development of feasible, impactful interventions, strengthen engagement by enabling natural owners – government, societal leaders and mobilised communities – to have ownership over WASH delivery and ensure knowledge and learning processes are the driving force of the project to achieve long term, sustainable, socially inclusive change.

The project targets 112,000 populations which includes women, girls, transgender, persons with disability, elderly, sanitary workers and other most at risk communities with transformative and safely managed WASH strategies.

Achievements: The overall achievement of the project has been establishment of an “inclusive” policy environment for the urban poor and a community-government led Single Window model for demanding better and more inclusive services for marginalised groups in urban settlements for the WASH Sector.