As part of our work with Sankalpa Rural Development Society we are currently involved in a very interesting challenge being run by ideo.org and funded and supported by water.org. This ‘challenge’ is about water and sanitation solutions in India and is currently in the evaluation phase. We have been assisting SRDS with the submission and the updates and collaboration in the challenge progress.
Most of the submissions have been about how to offer clean water and how to provide effective sanitation to low income households – our work is much more related to actually providing water itself.. but if you have no water, you cannot filter it and if you have no water you cannot use any sort of conventional toilet system. So we have offered our work to the challenge (see this link) and in the process of developing our submission have realised that collaboration and cooperation with other organisations who are offering diverse solutions is of most importance.
This video relates to how we may collaborate .. if our submission is successful we will do our best to establish these centres in the areas where we are working – with the intention that the idea catches on and that the villages where the Water Management Centres take hold will become models for other areas and villages to replicate.
Here is the idea – if you have any comments or suggestions on how we may improve or implement this please connect with us as we would love to hear your feedback.
We will keep you posted on updates to the challenge as the results come through. In the meantime the work with SRDS is progressing as we are assisting them to continue their excellent work with rain water harvesting – it is a difficult time in India – with many villages totally devoid of water and being dependent on water tankers – a good monsoon is predicted. Lets hope the weather men are right this year.
