Excerpt

Mahila Housing Trust (MHT), with support from Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, implemented an urban sanitation project over the 2011-2013, in the town of Katihar, in north-eastern part of the State of Bihar. The vision of the project is to ‘develop, test and refine business models and best practices’, for urban sanitation, that can then be scaled up to extend to other parts of Bihar. The project’s aim was to extend ‘sensitive sanitation solutions’ to at least 1,200 households, and create a local resource pool by training and generating employment for 250 people, predominantly women. The project also seeked to organise women into CBOs to ensure maintenance of the sanitation infrastructure.

Since the project envisioned ‘developing, testing and refining business models and best practices for urban sanitation’, research support was a crucial component of the project. IIHS was the research partner to MHT and responsible for the baseline and endline study of both the Sanitation and Karmika interventions. This report focusses on the Karmika intervention and presents findings of the Karmika baseline study.