Municipality WASH Plans
Before the state restructuring in 2017, water supply schemes supported by the Project were selected in Village Development Committee WASH Plans (V-WASH Plans) that prioritized schemes in most need. Now, most of the newly established municipalities cover various VDCs within their borders with several blank areas (not all the previous VDCs had V-WASH Plan). Therefore, the old V-WASH Plans are not accurate enough (and updated!) to be used as the main WASH planning tool in the municipalities.
In spring 2018, RWSSP-WN II piloted Municipality WASH Plan preparation in Harinas Rural Municipality, Syangja. The Project took a new innovative approach to the planning process – the field data was collected using smartphone- based KoBoCollect application that is a very fast and flexible data collection method but also enables presenting the data on a map as well as in a table format.
The visual presentation of data makes it easier to the local communities to analyse the data and spot any errors. What was also new, was that the data was collected on household level instead of scheme level. This enables more accurate analysis on unserved households, scheme functionality as well as harmonization with the Agenda 2030 indicators.
To ensure democratic and transparent planning process, all municipality wards organized first their own ward-level planning meeting after which the municipality collects the ward plans are prepares the Municipality WASH Plan.
The pilot proved that it is crucial that the new municipalities prepare fresh municipality level WASH plans: the analysis showed that even within served areas with safely managed water supply systems, there are still several unserved households. Based on the experience, the Project can heartily recommend the method to be copied in other municipalities as well.
Click here for the Harinas Rural Municipality WASH Plan (English version)