When the citizens of Lapilang, a village in the northeastern region of Nepal, needed fresh drinking water, they would collect their buckets and set out on an hours long journey up a steep mountainside overlooking the foothills of the Himalayas.
Water Access Sanitation and Hygiene for the Urban Poor (WASH-UP), funded by USAID, helped to improve availability and access to water and sanitation services in three slum communities of Accra and two slum communities in the urban area of Sekondi-Takoradi. Using a community-driven approach that involved residents and a broad range of stakeholders, Global Communities implemented programs to create sustainable improvements in water and sanitation access while improving hygiene behaviors.
The objective of this activity is to empower citizens to identify and address their development needs by defining and implementing community development plans. The goal is to support at least 200 communities in Guatemala’s Western Highlands using a community-based development approach to identify development priorities, ranging from increasing access to schools and community centers to expanding drinking water supplies and sanitation services. The activity also engages with the private sector and other donors to ensure sustainable results.
What made USAID’s work in Nepal unique was the use of “Community Driven Development.” In this approach, an outside organization may offer to fund important small infrastructure projects, but it is up to community members themselves to identify, implement and maintain those projects. Instead of simply relying on outsiders to fund necessary improvements, the community will gain experience in democracy, local governance and demand greater accountability from leaders.
The food security situation in the targeted area of Bangladesh was critical at the point of project inception in 2010. Despite real wage growth in the previous five years leading to program initiation, a high rate of households, 31.5 percent, were in poverty. High food commodity prices, rising since 2007, exacerbated an already poor food security situation.
Since June 2010, Save the Children has been implementing the USAID-supported Title II PL480 Multi-Year Assistance Program in Bangladesh, “Nobo Jibon.” The program is designed “to reduce food insecurity and vulnerability for 191,000 direct beneficiary households…in ten upazilas of Barisal Division over five years.” It has three strategic objectives (SOs) in the areas of maternal and child health and nutrition (SO1), market-based production and income generation (SO2), and disaster risk reduction (SO3), as well as a cross-cutting gender component.
BAP is the third phase of a 10-year agricultural development project that evolved through a pilot phase focused on community development and food security, to a second phase focused on increasing surpluses and connecting farmers to markets, to a third phase that emphasized transitioning beneficiary farmers to commercially oriented business enterprises.
The Zambia Integrated Systems Strengthening Program (ZISSP) was a four-and-a-half year USAID-funded, Abt Associates-led project which increased the use of quality, high-impact health services through a health systems strengthening approach in Zambia.
In Uganda, WASHplus worked in the districts of Kisoro, Kabale, and Kanungu to strengthen the capacity of USAID implementing partners—SPRING, Community Connector, STAR-SW, among others—to integrate WASH into both nutrition and HIV activities. In these communities access to water is a burden borne by women and children who carry small buckets or jerry cans to distant water points over difficult terrain. What a difference a water-saving tippy tap hand washing station or a rain catchment system can make—examples of small doable approaches that WASHplus promotes.
