Nurturing young fellows on water and sanitation
Mentoring of young Professionals to Facilitate Community-Led Actions for Improved Water and Sanitation in the Rural Areas of North Karnataka.
Location: 17 Gram Panchayats in Dharwad, Haveri, Gadag and Kolar districts
Coverage: Approx 100,000 population or 20,000 families.
Background
Today almost half of the people in the developing world lack access to improved sanitation. Many more lack access to good sanitation. Most daunting sanitation deficit is its scale. Some 2.6 billion people lack access to improved sanitation, two and a half times the deficit for access to clean water.
Reaching the Millennium Development Goal of halving the deficit against 1990 level would require bringing improved sanitation to more than 120 million people every year till 2015. And even if the goal is reached that would leave 1.8 billion people without access to sanitation. Each percentage gap between the goal and achievement means grave setback for human development with several thousand millions of people affected by illness and several thousand avoidable child deaths.
Project objectives:
To recruit Young Professionals (YP) with a passion to live and work in rural areas.
To channelize the energies of these youth towards community-led actions to improve Water & sanitation issues.
To build capacities of YPs to assume leadership roles in community development especially in sanitation and water issues.
To expose the YPs to developmental frameworks and live examples of development models.
To mentor and motivate the YPs with the help of development professionals with long experience of committed work who will be role models for the YPs.
To train and assist YPs in understanding the needs of the community through participatory interactions and design participatory action plans for overcoming deficits in sanitation and drinking water situation.
To enable YPs to emerge as major change agents in the areas of Water and Sanitation in their area of operation.
To guide the YPs in different organizational structures in carrying the development activities in the sector
Key activities to be taken in the project
Selection and recruitment of Young Professionals
Induction
Mentoring
Training
Monitoring and Evaluation of YPs
Development of Participatory Plans and implementation
A total of Young fellows were selected in two phases. The first phase consisted four fellows and the second had 13 fellows. The fellows were trained in Water and Sanitation issues. They drew Participatory Action Plans (PAP) and implemented. The results of their community empowerment toilet construction got accelerated from 28 to 87%.
The fellows stayed in the village with the communities to understand the water and sanitation scenario first hand. They sat with the community and drew the Participatory Action Plans and implemented the same in their respective villages with consensus.
