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Improving Rural Sanitation through Community Toilets

Sankalpa partnered with Haritika, a non-governmental organization (NGO) from Central India to implement this project. Haritika works with people whose lives are dominated by extreme poverty, illiteracy, disease and other handicaps. With multifaceted development interventions, Haritika strives to bring about positive change in the quality of life of the poor people of Bundelkhand region of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh.

Haritika firmly believes and is actively involved in promoting dignity and gender equity through poor people's social, economic, political and human capacity building. Although the emphasis of Haritika's work is at the individual level and village level sustaining the work of the organization depends on an environment that permits the poor to break out of the cycle of poverty and hopelessness. To this end, Haritika endeavors to bring about change at the level of national policy on poverty reduction, water and sanitation and social progress. Haritika is committed to making its programs socially, financially and environmentally sustainable, using new methods and improved technologies.

Project:
This project was carried out as part of the “Rural Health and Environment Programme” (RHEP) being implemented by Haritika in very backward and poor villages of Madhya Pradesh. The mission of RHEP is to improve the quality of life of the rural communities in terms of both physical living conditions as well as available economic opportunities to engineer a process of “reverse migration” from urban centres to villages. This project was implemented in the Singrawan Khurd village in Chattarpur district.

The main tasks involved in this project were (i) formation of a Village Water & Sanitation Committee (VWSC), (ii) developing a feasibility analysis process through which the community would be able to decide feasible and viable sanitation options, (iii) mobilizing the community for participation in terms of money, time and labour, and (iv) constructing 50 household twin-pit latrines to declare Singrawan Khurd an “open-defecation free” village.

The funds provided by Sankalpa for this project were utilized in order to offset some of the material costs associated with constructing the toilets. The entire labour for this effort was provided by the villagers of Singrawan Khurd. Another unique aspect of this project was the increased involvement of women and other minorities, which was especially emphasized to foster a sense of unity and community ownership. This community involvement also aimed to ensure community participation in the oversight and maintenance of the constructed to     
                  


Project Timeline:
  • Proposal Submission: May 2006
  • Project Approval and Funding: June 2006
  • Project Initiation: June 2006
  • Interim Project Report: Aug 2006
  • Project Completion: Sep 2006
  • Final Project Report: Sep 2006
Project related documents (proposals, reports, etc):
Project proposal submitted by Haritika [View Proposal]
Progress report from Haritika                 [View Report]