Community involvement is vital to the success of our projects. In places where wells or latrines have been built without community involvement, they will often fall into disrepair as nobody maintains the services or fixes them when they break.
Our projects rely on community ownership. In the early stages we discuss problems and solutions with communities so that they fully understand the links between water, sanitation and hygiene and are motivated to change their environment themselves.
We work with partners to help communities develop the skills to set up, operate and maintain their own water and sanitation facilities and to learn about good hygiene. In this way, communities themselves own the projects and will use them properly and maintain them long into the future.
To ensure that projects operate effectively, community members are often asked to contribute by making regular small payments or contributing at the start of the project. When people are unable to pay they can contribute labor or materials instead, or are subsidized by others. These contributions pay for the setup costs and maintenance of projects, and often the salaries of local staff, who keep the facilities in good working order.
Often these contributions are significantly less than the communities were paying already for their water, particularly from expensive vendors in urban areas or for medicines for treating the sick. Communities with access to water and sanitation services often report being better off. Without spending hours each day collecting water, women can carry out other work and generate an income and children can go to school.