Community engagement is the cornerstone of CURE’s work: we strive to understand peoples’ needs, goals, and dreams. The community’s perspective is particularly crucial when working with water and sanitation, because it is such an intimate part of everyday life. In order to improve infrastructure and access, we need a complete picture of how people live, what challenges they face, and how they envision a better future. Community engagement is not only good practice, it is essential to successful projects—communities know the intricacies of their situation better than anyone else. Their expertise is crucial to identifying and prioritizing problems, and their participation makes it possible to determine the solutions and implement them on the ground.
Over the course of its work, CURE has developed best practices around community engagement. Having tested these strategies in the field, CURE has the capacity to share its knowledge with other organizations that work in similar areas. On June 11-12, 2015, CURE held a training workshop for field staff and community leaders of the NGOs Centre for Advocacy and Research (CFAR) and Mahila Pragati Manch (MPM), entitled ‘Community Participation for improving Water, Sanitation and Hygiene in Slum Areas’.
The workshop was designed to walk participants through the process of community engagement and introduce some activities that CURE has used successfully in the field.
To kick off the workshop, participants painted a canvas their names on a canvas and drew pictures. Then they swapped nametags with other participants and found their names on the canvas. Icebreakers like this are important to community engagement, especially when discussing sensitive topics like health and hygiene, to help everyone relax and get to know each other. They are useful even when participants are already acquainted, to create an open atmosphere and make it clear that everyone’s contributions are equally valid.
Next, we broke into small groups to play WASH Scrabble, connecting words to the central concepts: Water, Toilet, Garbage, Health and Environment. In the end, each group read out their scrabble and picked those that were common to other themes. By comparing the links that each group made, we could see that WASH is an interconnected issue where water is linked to toilets, waste, health, and environmental issues, and that all of these must be addressed in a comprehensive manner. Working in groups allows shyer participants to feel at ease and encourages people who might not know each other to interact; comparing the different results between groups sparks new insights and makes unexpected connections.
Next, we asked participants to map their mental image of a slum. They mapped out dilapidated houses, dirty community toilets, open garbage dumps, open and clogged drains, slaughter houses, etc.
Groups also made maps of settlements and marked hotspots that need improvement, like Makhi (flies), Machhar (mosquitoes) and Badboo (smell). They discussed why these areas were dirty and what could be done to improve them. As these maps show, mapmaking is a great tool for working with informal communities. Thinking spatially may be more productive than simply asking people to list problems, since their experiences are linked to specific streets and landmarks. Conceptual maps can also be useful at the implementation stage of a project; as anyone who has tried to use Google Maps in a slum knows, official maps are not always accurate.
On the second day of the conference, we used an icebreaker called the 24-seed game to start a conversation on gender issues. Participants were divided into four groups; married women, unmarried women, married men and unmarried men. Each group was given 24 kidney beans, representing the 24 hours of a day, and asked to divide them up into their normal daily routine. The results were startling: married women were clearly overburdened, with only a few beans devoted to sleep or leisure. Boys and married men, on the other hand, had more relaxing routines. Young girls participated in household chores while young boys did not. A significant part of womens’ routines revolved around water and sanitation: they spent far more time than men collecting water and using public toilets—at least two hours a day. Gender inequality can be a touchy subject, but this simple game made it easier to talk about, and left all the participants with the conclusion that taps and toilets at home would allow women to use their time more productively.
Later in the day, the CURE staff shared their on the ground experience with community engagement in Savda Ghevra and Sapheda Basti near Geeta Colony. In Sapheda Basti, CURE has helped build household toilets and connected them to the DJB sewer system. In Savda Ghevra, a resettlement site on the northwest edge of Delhi, CURE addressed sanitation issues by building a decentralized cluster septic tank linked to a DEWAT at the end for recycling water. Both of these projects relied on collaboration with government agencies. Mr. Prabhat Chaturvedi, an engineer-consultant with CFAR, explained some of the challenges in working with the government.
Improving WASH in informal settlements can sometimes seem overwhelming. As we learned from the scrabble activity, successful solutions need to address a web of interconnected problems: sewage, drinking water, garbage, flooding, gender inequality. Failure to consider these connections can undermine a project; for example, building new drains is pointless if they get clogged with trash.
CURE uses a simple exercise to help residents untangle the challenges they face: we ask them to rank key issues in order of urgency, and ask six questions about each one—what, where, when, why, who, and how. Breaking down the challenges into smaller components makes them less intimidating, and considering every aspect insures that proposed solutions will not end up backfiring. Once we’ve broken down the challenges, we can develop short and long-term solutions and make plans for implementation.
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