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Piloting a community process for water safety plans
01.07.2011
Water safety plans (WSPs) can be used by a community to safeguard its water quality without having to rely solely on external agencies and their use of specialized incubator-based kits and trained personnel. To date, most WSPs have been created for safeguarding large-scale, municipal supplies. Tearfund is currently piloting a process for facilitating beneficiary communities (mainly rural) to create their own WSPs. The process is highly participative, and seeks to empower water accountability groups to effectively self-manage their water system from its source to the point of consumption. The process is also gender sensitive, and explores the various useful roles of men, women and older children in monitoring and preventing contamination of their supply, with outputs which can be tailored for communities which are literate or non-literate.