Nepal 2

NEPAL	Community Infrastructure Projects in Nepal
When you ask anyone from the Nepal Mahila Ekta Samaj what their organization’s priorities are, they’ll tell you the same thing: water and toilets. Water scarcity and lack of sanitation in Kathmandu’s poor settlements are huge problems, and the burden of dealing with them falls heaviest on women. The absence of toilets and sewers means enduring the danger and indignity of having to defecate in the open and a host of serious health problems. During the dry season, the river slows to a trickle, wells run dry, the water table drops and piped municipal water comes dribbling out of taps for only an hour or so each day, staggered around the city, so women have to queue for water in the middle of the night.	In the Pativara squatter settlement, where 187 families share two water pumps, women have to manage for families of five with just five gagris per day (about 100 liters), for cooking, cleaning, washing, bathing. Then there is the question of water quality, which in Pativara is so bad that diarrhea and dysentery are endemic. Communities have long struggled to find make-shift solutions to these problems, but in the past year, several things have given their efforts a big boost. Exchange visits to community infrastructure projects elsewhere in Asia have brought an infusion of new ideas and the two federations have provided a channel for spreading these ideas around. Plus there are more funds to help pay for water and sanitation projects since Water Aid UK set up shop in Kathmandu a year ago. With support from Lumanti’s technical team, poor communities are taking advantage of these developments to plan and carry out more and more infrastructure improvement projects in their settlements, using community labor. As this work expands, communities are getting more entrepreneurial, coaxing materials and additional funds from their local politicians and ward officers and from other aid projects in the city.
	Street Paving The skill and artistry which goes into laying Kathmandu’s traditional brick pavings is alive and well in the city’s poor communities, which have topped their sewer and toilet projects with lane paving projects. They use no concrete or reinforcing, just packed earth, a layer of sand and then “Chinese” bricks laid very tightly on their edge in beautiful patterns.
	Toilets A few shared community toilets have been built in squatter settlements in the city’s periphery, but most toilet building projects have been in individual houses, where new pour-flush style latrine pans are built with their own small septic tanks as soak pits, where sewer lines are not available, or with pipes which connect directly to community-built lane sewers.
	Sewers and drainage There is an extensive network of underground sewers in Kathmandu, but only 20 - 30% of households in the metropolitan area are connected to them. Several inner-city slum communities have repaired or built new underground lane sewers (linked to the city mains) which function as both storm and sewage drainage.
	Water supply Adding or improving community water sources continues to be the highest priority. Besides digging bore wells and installing various kinds of hand pumps, communities have built tanks for storing water distributed by tankers, rehabilitated existing open wells and negotiated with NWSC to install both metered municipal water taps and communal standposts.