Published on: 02/06/2014
The European Union grant provides significant backing to IRC’s groundbreaking work with the Burkinabè government to test concrete solutions for adequate and lasting hygiene and sanitation services and improve sector policies with appropriate approaches, methods and tools. The strategic aim of this new project, is to tackle the huge delay in progress towards hygiene and sanitation, as well as to address the bottlenecks in ensuring sustainability of services by using development aid while considering the ultimate expectation of a sector running without international aid.
IRC’s approach will be focused on building municipalities and national government’s ability to ensure hygiene and sanitation services, while combining effective installation of hardware and ensuring all conditions needed for lasting behavioral change in rural areas are met.
“IRC is excited to be partnering with the EU, the Ministry of water and sanitation in Burkina Faso, Helvetas Swiss Intercooperation and six municipalities to meet the challenge of adequate and lasting sanitation for rural people. IRC believes strongly that strengthening the ability of municipalities to lead the provision of services is not only the best route to scale, but the only viable strategy for developing adapted and viable solutions for lasting hygiene and sanitation. By supporting this project, The EU Commission in Burkina Faso is giving a strong push to the achievement of our vision of providing everyone in Burkina with sanitation, hygiene and water services that will last forever – with a new mindset and appropriate approaches and tools.” – Juste Hermann Nansi, Country Director, IRC Burkina Faso.
Over the last five years, IRC has identified key building blocks that are required to establish sustainable services in water, hygiene and sanitation and an approach to deliver them as part of their Sustainable Services at Scale action-research programme operating in Burkina Faso, Ghana and Uganda. In Burkina Faso, this has meant working with government agencies at both national and regional levels and 21 municipalities in 7 regions. As a preliminary result, 300,000 people can now trust that their local authorities and service providers are doing the right job with appropriate tools and methods to deliver adequate, reliable and lasting water, hygiene and sanitation services. This is a significant change from only counting hardware without caring about the quality of services provided. The EU grant is considered as recognition of the rightness of IRC’s vision, approaches and methods and this grant will help to extend the results to an additional 100,000 people while seeking scaling-up through improvement of national policies.
For more information, please contact:
Mr. Juste Hermann NANSI, Country Director, IRC Burkina Faso
