Scale

Turning on the tap in a few hundred schools is not enough. Ultimately, school WASH actors must seek 100 percent coverage in school WASH. This objective needs to be kept in mind from the start, even if the initial number of schools is in the project is modest. Thankfully there are creative ways to increase reach, most of which are underpinned by a team approach.

In Central America, the work accomplished to date and geographic reach of the program is significant, despite the relatively small grant size.  This is due primarily to the ability of the program partners to leverage funding and personnel from other, better-funded initiatives and also receive important contributions from local governments and community members.  In the future, SWASH+ and Millennium Water Alliance partners will explore including school WASH in all other water resource-related programs and initiatives they conduct.

The most important player within such a collaborative approach is typically the government. The secretariat of SWASH+ Central America has concluded that scaling-up to reach all rural public schools in Central America in need of school WASH can be accomplished only through significant increases in grants, national government funding or contributions made by local governments and communities.

Similarly, within Kenya, scale-up for school WASH will most effectively be achieved through the government’s Kenya Education Sector Support Programme (KESSP) which has funding from the World Bank, the UK’s Department for International Development and UNICEF. SWASH+ and the Government of Kenya recently signed a memorandum of understanding to pilot a set of enhancements to the current KESSP approach, which involves direct disbursement of funds to assist Kenya's poorest primary schools in improving their basic school infrastructure. During the pilot phase, the SWASH+ consortium partners will provide technical support and oversight on the implementation of the enhanced direct funding model in 18 pilot schools. SWASH+ has also influenced in-service training for teachers and WASH aspects of the curriculum at the national level.