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Published on: 17/08/2021

From municipalities to mancomunidades

"I think that implementing the joint model with COMAS (Municipal Commission for Water and Sanitation) and USCL (Local Supervision and Control Unit) can be a good strategy, especially since most of the municipalities belong to an association (mancomunidad), and in other sectors there have been better results with inter-municipal commissions."
- Eli Anibal Morales, Director of MAMCEPAZ (an association of municipalities of Center of La Paz in Honduras)

We work in Honduras through the Para Todos, Por Siempre (PTPS) – Everyone, Forever – movement, which brings together government entities, NGOs and associated municipalities, under the vision of achieving universal access and sustainable WASH services.

In 2020, we started scaling up the 'Everyone, Forever' approach from municipal to mancomunidad (association of municipalities) level. We established new partnerships with mancomunidades in La Paz, together with Water For People. Support for other municipalities and partners associated with PTPS was limited due to COVID-19 travel restrictions. This was partially overcome by providing a series of learning webinars to members, but it meant that little progress was made against municipal-level outcomes.

National level influencing focused on articulating an agenda for sector reform and getting political support for that. There is now a member of parliament who is taking up WASH issues in congress and we supported the government in becoming more engaged in Sanitation and Water for All. All this means that the partnerships PTPS is engaged with have strengthened further and put us in a stronger position for influencing.

The year was characterised by the provision of support activities, which were required as a result of widespread emergencies:

  • PTPS contributed to the WASH emergency roundtable and developing a COVID-19 response from the WASH sector;
  • the PTPS secretariat supported the coordination of the mapping process to assess the damage to water supply systems caused by hurricanes Eta and Iota. In many regions the damage was major, and in the most affected municipalities, actual coverage rates dropped significantly.

Find out more about our work in Honduras

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