Integration of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) Services into other BRAC Programmes

Since its initiation, BRAC Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) Programme has made enormous strides in enhancing national WASH initiatives by reaching 68.74 million people across 289 sub-districts of Bangladesh. The programme has operated in three phases over the past ten years through effective interventions for providing nationwide integrated WASH services. Although the programme has been working successfully at a large scale it has been observed that the rate of slippage has been quite high over the years. Programme data indicates that slippage per year can be estimated to be 3.75% per year meaning that these WASH options provided cannot be considered as safe or hygienic after a period of time. To maintain sustainability in terms of maintenance, cleanliness and consistent use of facilities, more comprehensive and targeted approach has to be adopted. Recognising this gap, BRAC WASH programme designed and initiated a project titled "Integration of WASH services into other BRAC Programmes” in order to sustain the achievements and increase WASH coverage in the programmes existing working areas under its previous 250 sub-districts. To implement the project BRAC requested support from EKN that confirmed its contribution to this project in November 2016. The rest of the costs for the project implementation is being covered from BRAC’s fund and community contribution. The complete duration of the project is around 4 years (November 2016 – March 2020). The key concept of this project is to mainstream WASH as a part of overall development efforts by delivering WASH services through integrating activities with other core programmes of BRAC. BRAC being the largest NGO in the world consists of several programmes that inherently include WASH components in their interventions. The project aims to strengthen these interventions by collaborating with four other BRAC programmes in order to expand coverage and sustain the gains. The four collaborating programmes are Health Nutrition and Population Programme (HNPP), BRAC Education Programme (BEP), Targeting the Ultra Poor (TUP) and BRAC Microfinance (MF). The idea is to place WASH as a strong component in each of these programme’s strategies.