About the Project
The Pakistan Safe Drinking Water and Hygiene Promotion Project is implemented through a task order awarded under USAID's Environmental Health Indefinite Quantity Contract (PDF, 2pp, 188 kb).
Background
The mortality rate for children under-five in Pakistan is 101 deaths per 1000 children. Water and sanitation related diseases are responsible for 60% of the total number of child mortality cases in Pakistan, with diarrheal diseases estimated at killing over 200,000 under-five years’ children, every year. Unsafe drinking water is shown to lead to poverty through time spent by women and girls to fetch ‘drinkable’ water from long distances. The combination of unsafe water consumption and poor hygiene practices causes hardship due to resultant high costing treatments for water borne illnesses, decreased working days, and also contribute to lowering of educational achievement due to reduced school attendance by children.
Project Description
The Pakistan Safe Drinking Water and Hygiene Promotion Project to is implemented by USAID through Abt Associates and its partners, the Academy for Educational Development (AED), The QED Group, LLC, MWH, and the Institute for Sustainable Communities (ISC). The project will help in providing technical assistance in hygiene and sanitation promotion and community mobilization along with extensive capacity building in order to complement Pakistan's substantial investments in hardware for safe drinking water. The project will involve activities in 31 selected districts/agencies of four Provinces of Pakistan, including earthquake affected areas of NWFP, FATA and Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJ&K).
The overall goal of the USAID/Pakistan Interim Strategic Plan is to promote equality, economic growth, and improved well-being of Pakistani families. More specifically the strategic objective of this project is improved health for vulnerable populations and increased use of proven interventions to prevent major infectious diseases.
This project is being implemented in a collaborative and supportive strategy with the Ministry of Industries, Production & Special Initiatives Clean Drinking Water Projects. The project will provide training, and education on hygiene and sanitation practices, operation and maintenance of treatment facilities, water quality testing and will also address water source protection to prevent contamination of water. The project also aims to demonstrate how social mobilization may lead to sustainability and better management of filtration plants by the communities.
This project will assist the GOP’s Ministry of Industry to design a comprehensive hygiene and sanitation promotion strategy for safe water management, hygienic behavior, and safe sanitation practices. The strategy will be implemented by NGO’s through a grant program.
The project will also provide support to Governmental agencies and NGO’s and communities through capacity-building and training in operations and management of water treatment units, hygiene and sanitation promotion, community mobilization, planning, cost recovery, and water resources management to ensure that investments in hardware and promotional activities will be sustainable in the long-term.
The overarching goal of the project is to build institutional capacity so that developing countries like Pakistan can continue to improve health systems after the project ends.
