From Sireesha Patnaik, Friends of Women World Banking, Ahmedabad
Posted 27 May 2011
I work with Friends of Women World Banking (FWWB), on Water and Sanitation which is a pan-India programme. Currently, we partner with six microfinance institutions in Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Uttarakhand and have been able to touch lives of about 2,000 women beneficiaries and their households in providing access to water and sanitation.
FWWB-India initiated interventions on infrastructure credit in 2000, that gained momentum in 2008 – 09 with the launch of FWWB-I’s Water and Sanitation ‘WATSAN’ Programme. The main objective of the programme is to improve the overall quality of life of women by facilitating access to water and sanitation through credit services and creating awareness on hygiene and sanitation through our partners.
FWWB-I also assists its partner MFIs in training and capacity building, by linking them up with technical consultants, training on hygiene and sanitation awareness, demand creation, technical training, etc. Following our monitoring visits and discussions with WATSAN partner organizations and industry experts, what has emerged clearly to us is the immediate need for FWWB-I to play a deeper role in implementing the water and sanitation loan product.
For sanitation, our experience shows we need to start with training and awareness on health, hygiene; why sanitation and its effective utilization; essentially an IEC (Information Education and Communication). While there is a lot of IEC material available, we realized that there is a need to create standard training material, available in different languages, which is easily accessible on net. This will help organizations to save time and investment from developing the
same material. Besides it would also be a valuable contribution towards addressing the MDGs (Millennium Development Goal - 7c).
We request you to provide us the following-
- IEC material you or your partners have developed. If you have soft copies please send us the links.
- How have you used the material, and how effective has it been? Please let us know if you have user inter-personal communication, mass contact, or other methods.
- Please suggest a framework for organizing this material that can be modified as per local conditions.
Hence we look forward to create a high quality standardized IEC material with inputs from expert organizations in this sector. In this regard we would like to have your opinion, sharable materials and suggestions for the same.
Download the below attachment for response