MISAAL Program

MOVING INDIA TOWARDS SANITATION FOR ALL

Urban Management Centre (UMC) is implementing USAID supported Moving India Towards Sanitation for All (MISAAL) program in four cities of India; Ahmedabad and Porbandar in Gujarat, Jodhpur in Rajasthan and Sambalpur in Odisha. MISAAL program fundamentally focuses on supporting cities on sustaining open defecation free status (ODF). Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs (MoHUA), Government of India launched the Swachh Bharat (Clean India) Mission in 2014 with the objectives to eliminate open defecation in Indian cities, change behaviour for healthy sanitation practices and capacity augmentation for local governments to create an enabling environment for community and private sector participation. 

MISAAL emphasizes mapping, measurement and monitoring of sanitation service delivery and infrastructure to achieve and sustain open defecation free (ODF) cities. MISAAL is supporting local governments to address ODF sustenance challenges including

Last mile gaps in WASH services, especially in slums and slum-like settlements
Limited community participation
Absence of robust service delivery performance measurement and monitoring mechanisms
Lack of interdepartmental coordination
Limited public awareness efforts towards sustainable WASH

UMC along with local government conducted ‘sanitation mapping’ which provided an ecosystem to capture, collate, analyse and represent data using GIS, from primary surveys of around 30,000 households spread over 223 slum settlements across 4 cities in India. Sanitation mapping has geocoded each household with data from our primary survey including demographics, user behaviour, WASH service delivery and citizen feedback on the quality of WASH services provided to them. This rich spatial dataset enables local governments to undertake spatial analysis, data driven planning, operational decision making, interdepartmental coordination and participatory community engagement.

To put Sanitation Mapping into practice, we are creating and enabling community groups called MISAAL Settlement Committees (MSC) – a residents’ welfare association (RWA) equivalent of slum settlements. The MSC are enabled to prepare their own Settlement Improvement Plans (SIP), where communities prepare a map of their settlements, diagnose civic issues, identify stakeholders, and draw an action plan to undertake the improvements. Behavior change communication (BCC) is pivotal to ODF sustenance. UMC has developed simple tools that enables community led “learning by doing” to drive behavior change communication. The MSC are trained and capacitated to use these tools which brings about participatory platforms for conducting BCC for ODF sustenance.

SANITATION MAPPING TOOL

Swachh Bharat Mission – Urban (SBM-U) has helped all urban local bodies (ULB) in India to become open defecation free (ODF). Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA), Government of India introduced the prestigious annual Swachh Survekshan (Cleanliness Ranking) of ULBs. ULBs score additional marks if they assess compliance of public and community toilets with the ODF+ protocols.The tool has been developed by Urban Management Centre (UMC) with support from USAID.

The ‘Sanitation Mapping Tool’ helps the ULBs to make their public and community toilets (PT/ CT) ODF+ compliant. The tool enables the following:

Identify infrastructure gaps and prepare a repair and refurbishment plan with cost estimates based on Government e-Marketplace (GeM) portal.
Monitor cleanliness of PT/ CT periodically (daily/ weekly/ monthly/ quarterly).
Monitor infrastructure and cleanliness of status at the state/ city level.

Some of the salient features of the tool are as follows:

Geotagged assessment of PT/ CTs
Maintains a unique ID for each facility
Assign unique ID to each of the surveyed public and community toilets
Represent surveyed PT/ CTs spatially on Google Maps
Can accept data from with Google Toilet Locator app
Dynamic dashboard with graphs/ charts for 20 parameters of all facilities assessed at city/ state/ national level
OTP based user registration and subsequent logins (no need to remember passwords)
User-friendly web based interface compatible with all mobiles and tablets for android, IOS and Windows platforms

URL: https://sanitationmapping.com

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CHILDREN ENGAGEMENT UNDER MISAAL - 'Gyan thi Gammat' - Learning with Fun

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the lives of the urban poor in many ways including loss of livelihoods for many young adults and an abrupt end of education for children in municipal/ government schools. Since March 2020, municipal/ government schools have been closed and many teachers have been assigned emergency duties to battle COVID-19 by the government. The students of these schools are also devoid of access to digital tools and devices to continue online learning unlike their counterparts in private schools.

Urban Management Centre (UMC) with support from USAID is implementing Moving India Towards Sanitation for All (MISAAL) program to strengthen WASH and community engagement in urban poor settlements in and Ahmedabad, Porbandar (Gujarat), Sambalpur (Odisha), and Jodhpur (Rajasthan).