Water, Sanitation and Household Energy Access

SSP helps rural communities seize opportunities provided by rural water and sanitation sector reforms. SSP's strategy for managing water resources is based on experiences and observations over the past three years about how women's groups and local governments can work together to improve water and sanitation services in targeted villages.

This strategy involves:

  Building local capacities, especially those of women, in planning, designing, managing and maintaining water and sanitation services.

  Supporting rural communities to achieve maximum mileage out of rural water and sanitation sector reforms.

  Motivating Gram Panchayats (local village governments) to commit themselves to new approaches by facilitating village water and sanitation committees and calling Gram Sabhas to involve the community.

  Encouraging women's collectives to monitor the developmental process.

  Improving livelihood activities related to the water sector.

  Facilitating cross-learning between different villages and surrounding areas.

SSP has given programme support to Gram Panchayats in the form of the following initiatives:

  General awareness campaigns

  Visits to villages and Gram Sabhas with the participation of village water and sanitation committees (VWSC), Gram Panchayat and SCG members

  Clean village campaigns that stress sanitation and safe waste disposal and the maintenance of kitchen gardens

  Meetings with women's groups on repairs and the use of public toilets, soak pit construction and waste collection

  Repairs and maintenance of the water supply

  The construction of water tanks by way of voluntary or contract work.

The role of SSP in this field is growing. In a World Bank- supported project in Maharashtra , SSP is the only NGO reaching forty-five villages in a community-driven water and sanitation project called Jalswarajya.

SANITATION

Total community sanitation has been pioneered by SSP since 2004, resulting in over fifty villages and 5,000 families living in open defecation-free villages. SSP is certified as a Key Resource Agency in the government-led Total Sanitation Campaign in the districts of Osmanabad, Latur and Nanded. Every year SSP promotes the Total Sanitation Campaign to one hundred new villages.

To increase sanitation awareness, SSP created a Community Learning Agency called Shikwa which prepares and deploys over 150 paraprofessionals to transfer knowledge and tools across four districts. As a result, over 520 villages and 350 officials from 16 districts learned from exposure visits and training programmes organised by paraprofessional teams in 2004-2005.

HOUSEHOLD ENERGY ACCESS

To address a lack of affordable energy sources, SSP partners with the private sector to distribute biomass appliances and clean fuel, producing an expansive social impact in the daily lives of low-income women and households.