Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) Consultancy

The Challenge

MCC has invested approximately $800 million in WASH in nine countries, mainly in water infrastructure development. More recently, they have expanded their focus into strengthening policy and institutional capacity and working with communities to improve rational use of water, increase use of latrines, and influence better hygiene behaviors.

Overview and Objectives

To provide effective direction to partner countries, particularly on the new focus areas, MCC awarded URC a contract (2014-2019) to provide technical assistance to help broaden understanding of WASH models that have been effective in increasing productivity, reducing poverty, improving health, and reducing gender inequality.

The project aims to provide MCC with support in:

• Assessing the WASH sector through secondary data and report analysis as well as in-country field visits and consultations
• Implementing support and oversight of WASH projects
• Consolidating sector and economic impact literature and best practices to justify and support optimal design of WASH projects

It provides an incentives-based scheme to increase demand for tools to reduce stunting, while improving the health sector capacity to respond to increased demand. The project builds on existing community engagement mechanisms which have successfully supported community efforts to improve targeted health and nutrition indicators. And it adds a supply component, which includes health and sanitation worker training, micronutrient provision, a media campaign, and sanitation and hygiene activities. 

URC provides technical support for implementation of the sanitation and hygiene program with a specific focus on stakeholder engagement for community-led total sanitation and reducing childhood stunting. Key elements of the work include:

• Fostering innovation to identify best models for the local context
• Promoting multi-sectoral engagement
• Building on and investing in existing resources
• Establishing systems for measuring change
• Building management capacity for overseeing WASH activities

Indonesia

In Indonesia, the Millennium Challenge Account—Indonesia (MCA-I) is implementing the Community‐Based Health and Nutrition to Reduce Stunting Project (CBHN) to reduce and prevent low birth weight, childhood stunting and malnutrition, and increase household income through cost savings, productivity growth and higher lifetime earnings. This project provides an incentive‐based scheme to increase demand for tools to reduce stunting, while improving the health sector’s capacity to respond to increased demand. The project builds on existing community engagement mechanisms, which have successfully supported community efforts to improve targeted health and nutrition indicators, and adds a supply component, which includes health and sanitation worker training, micronutrient provision, a media campaign, and sanitation and hygiene activities.

URC provides technical support for implementation of the sanitation and hygiene program with specific focus on stakeholder engagement for community-led total sanitation (CLTS) and reducing childhood stunting.

Niger

URC helped MCC by performing two assessments. Consultants also executed a variety of other task order requests.