Assist with SHRI's COVID-19 Response Efforts

SHRI fights alongside rural communities throughout India to end open defecation, a key step in the struggle for health equity, and social and economic justice. We are currently operating five community sanitation facilities that serve almost 5,000 toilet users per day. Furthermore, we are selling nearly 150,000 liters of safe drinking water each month. This is not only increasing access to another vital service - potabl water - but is also helping SHRI offset nearly 50% of its monthly O&M costs. 

We are currently constructing our sixth and seventh facilities. One of these is located in Bihar, while the other is in Jharkhand. Bihar and Jharkhand are two of India's poorest states, where the majority of people defecate in the open. We are proudly partnering with local communities, government stakeholders, and other civic societies to ensure the successful construction and implementation of these facilities. 

Your support to our work will help us ensure that we keep our facilities maintained and sustained. This is key to promoting consistent toilet use, and thus ending open defecation. 

Thank you for your time, interest, and continued support!

Dear Friends, 

I hope that this note finds you well. I would like to thank you again for your ongoing support of SHRI's mission. My team and I are incredibly grateful for this support. 

Since our crowdfunding campaign ended, we have been working tirelessly to complete construction of our sixth facility, which we hope will be ready later this spring. Unlike our previous facilities, this one will be staffed almost entirely by women from the community we are serving. Each of these women belongs to a local women's self-help group, which is part of a network of self-help groups organized by the government. These self-help groups were originally organized to help promote livelihood activities amongst women. Over the years, however, the government has also started engaging with the women in these groups as a means to improving community-wide health outcomes. The women are trained to conduct a variety of health promotion activities. For the purposes of this project, we are working with the women to equip them with the skills and tools they will need to successfully operate and manage this new SHRI facility. Each of the women will be paid a fair wage every month for the work that they do. 

Moving forward, we hope to use this model at all of our future facilities. In addition to providing WASH services to communities, we want to make sure that we are doing all that we can to ensure gender equity and equality in our work. We hope to work with those women who have an interest in working with us. We will make sure that they are trained and properly supported so that they can carry out this work, and actuate their leadership potential in the communities they belong to.

As always, thank you for the support. It means so much to me and my team, and is going a very long way in helping us advance our mission. Please do let me know if you have any questions, comments, or concerns!

Enjoy the day, friends!

Anoop 

Links:

• SHRI's work featured on the BBC World News!