Progress despite another unpredictable year
Context
Looking back on the close of the 2nd official year of the ambitious 5-year FINISH Mondial programme, we are celebrating the resilience of our teams. While life slowly started getting ‘back to normal’ for some of our teams based in Europe, our in-country programme teams (Bangladesh, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda), for a large part, faced continued difficult lockdowns in 2021. Flexibility and innovations prevailed, however. Political turmoil also disrupted normal operations in some programme countries such as Uganda, Ethiopia, and Tanzania. FINISH teams pressed on to meet people with safely managed sanitation, achieving a great percentage of what they set out to do, despite great uncertainties.
Highlights
India led the way in constructing a great amount of safely managed sanitation systems (51,026), while Uganda and Tanzania country programmes ended the year the most on track to reaching their set targets, both around 80%*. In an environment with already high toilet construction and usage, the Bangladesh country programme team shifted focus to address the critical waste management needs in the country, including faecal sludge and solid waste management collection, transportation, treatment, and reuse. Ethiopia team is on track for a great scale up in 2022, having focused on the technical training of a considerable number of entrepreneurs (227% of original target), to be able to construct the toilets that demand is currently being created for. The Kenya country programme can celebrate the serious inclusion of women in sanitation marketing, reporting 70% of those trained for sanitation marketing jobs being female. Meanwhile in India, women make up nearly half of those trained technically in quality construction and over 70% of total entrepreneurs engaged with business support.
To pull this off, we can thank veteran partners but also a few new partnerships which came together under FINISH Mondial this year. The Ethiopia team welcomed local organisation, Facilitator for Change (FC) in Amhara region, and Bangladesh worked on bringing a whole team together, opening a brand-new office in Dhaka. The Kenya country team worked with UNICEF on market-based approaches for sanitation in Nakuru county. Collaborations with other Dutch programmes like VEI’s WaterWorX continued strong with a geographic focus around Lake Victoria in Kenya (Homa Bay, Nakuru) and Tanzania (Mwanza). Water for People Uganda has joined hands with the FM Uganda team to create a concept for result-based financing for faecal sludge management to elevate the sanitation status of the country and demonstrate new ways of financing sanitation together.
You may have also caught the FINISH Mondial teams out in the international conference fora, sharing experiences and ambitions in its mission to contribute to healthier and socio-economically empowered communities. Thematically focusing on some of our niche expertise—innovative financing, faecal sludge management and circular economy, and health linkages—FINISH Mondial teams made appearances at the virtual FSM 7, SIWI World Water Week and UNC Water & Health conferences.
What’s next
Last year, we shared the year 2020 in review, calling it “progress despite a turbulent year”. We must look back and say it was again great progress despite an unpredictable year, as the un-invited COVID-19 guest overstayed its welcome. FINISH Mondial has developed a rich 2022 annual plan across global and all 6-country operations, featuring some big financial innovations ready to launch, geographic scaling-up, and key national level partnerships to ensure the sustainability of FINISH’s interventions. Today, we are celebrating all the wins and hurdles overcome by all our extended FINISH family. We will continue to push for another year of accelerating access to safely managed sanitation for all in 2022.
*Based on reporting up to October 2021.