We  developped a community-led approach to water management that was officially adopted by Uzbek authorities and will be extending in the whole country. Our project, financed by the Swiss Agency for Development and Coooperation, aims at supporting villages in rural areas in Uzbekistan to have access to safe drinking water through a full cost recovery model of decentralised community-managed water supply.

In parallel, a comprehensive hand washing promotion strategy was implemented through national campaigns for school children, combined with training of health care workers, to reduce water-borne diseases. After over a decade of our activities and advocacy, supplying over 160 000 people between the Ferghana and Syr Darya regions, the recently created Ministry of Communal Services finally adopted the model for scaling up throughout the country where and when feasible. Jointly, interested international financing institutions such as the World Bank are envisioning allocating funds for national replication.

Our team will support the existing drinking water organisations and prepare the identification of new village schemes to be financed through World Bank credits. Additionally, having reached out to over 10 000 (!) schools and 500 doctors and nurses, the methods proposed for the hygiene awareness raising are now incorporated in the curricula of training and retraining of doctors and nurses, having been adopted by the Ministry of Health. There was a meeting officialising the adoption of the project model by the Uzbek authorities and extending it to the whole country.

To know more about the approch, see these videos.