Lack of access to safely managed water and sanitation affects especially poor and rural regions worldwide. Governments are on risk of not achieving their SDG 6 goals, as traditional water and sanitation infrastructure requires heavy government investments with high per capita ratio; which local governments may not be capable of afford. The company produces rainwater harvesting, rural composting bathrooms and rural water filters. For those products, it has developed a social and economic impact model to foster their impacts on rural communities through five phases that diagnose, enable, install, follow up and insights recovery from WASH projects in the communities.

The objective of the model is to enhance the potential impact of water harvesting, rural bathroom and water filters in rural underdeveloped households through a series of steps to diagnose, enable, install, follow up and insights recovery.
- Purposely driven activities to foster the impact with communities
- Community led transformation, as intervened households become ambassadors of WASH best practices with the rest of the community
- Value chain design to integrate value creating activities into the company portfolio
- Key tasks assigned in field to specific profiles
- Formats to recover KPIs that measure progress towards creating social and economic impact with the households and communities
- Dashboard that shows progress towards social impact in project execution
- KPIs aligned with major poverty initiatives (SDGs, Joint Monitoring Programme, Inter American Development Bank and multidimensional poverty measurement iniciatives)
- Stages to measure the project performance, generate insights and adjust following stages, product design and community interaction
- Deep community interaction, as WASH initiatives are created within the community and through participative dialogue sessions.
- Alignment between social and environmental KPIs with business-driven incentives.
- Integration to the product portfolio to invite NGOs, Governments and other parties to develop purposely-driven water and sanitation initiatives.
- Product instructions manuals in different indigenous languages (Mazateco, Zapoteco, Tseltal).
- Flexibility to replicate the model and its stages on other rural communities, adjusting for their specific circumstances.
- Secondary impact on other SDGs and targets, as safely managed access to water and sanitation enables other downstream impacts.

The most important institutional challenge is to influence other stakeholders (NGOs, governments, clients, etc.), to support the development of comprehensive WASH initiatives that aim for ensuring the most of the social and environmental impact on households and communities; as common institutional incentives are more aligned with performance (quantity of households benefited) rather than impact (KPIs on long term performance).

Beneficiaries: model main stakeholder, they’re first approached to define specific necessities for the household, gain their project approval and compromise towards the rest of the stages. Community: context in which WASH projects are developed, there are activities to engage the community, address concerns and create follow up plans. Funding partners: monetary sources providers. Installation teams:trained to solve specific concerns about the product. Staff field personnel: They execute, oversee, engage the community, coordinate activities, provide training to the beneficiaries and ensure anthropologic follow up. Governments: Kept up to date with the project progress

The project was conducted in two phases: Design and implementation

Design – The creation of the model’s impact was designed through a series of field trips to various communities. The purpose was to detect the most relevant social interactions in communities, with the goal of developing a systemic analysis.
As a result of the analysis, the most relevant KPIs, interactions, variables, moments of use and steps were detected. After this activity, the team selected the ones with the biggest potential to enhance social impact of the WASH initiative in households and at the communities. As a result, the model was created.

Implementation – the key phases of the project were developed during a 9-month stage of monitoring and execution. The field staff team deployed the activities in three rural communities that gave a total of 100 households, plus 10 control households. During the implementation, the team continuously recovered knowledge and insights, which were used to improve the model.

- 77% of our solutions are current use thanks to a proper installation.
- Since the installation, the time invested in the obtention of water has been diminished 90%
- Among the preference motives a 60% highlights greater perception of quality in the water.
- For the sanitation solution, among the preference motives a 73% highlights more comfort and practicality.
- Before the installation, the monetary investment in families for water obtention was $255 MXN. In the third visit, the investment was of $91.8, which represents 64% less.
- At the first month after the capacitation stage, a saving of $100 MXN was detected in the economy of the families.
- The understanding of the solution has a meaningful high statistic correlation of .675 with the visits of accompany and reflecting a medium statistic correlation of .39 with the capacitation.

The main constrain was the reach of the initiative; as it was a pilot project, it’s reach would not be sufficient to make broad conclusions.

Additionally, the company is focused on enhancing the impact of its products, though, other stakeholders must be engaged with the same goal. In Latin America, there are various incentives for governments to focus on results (benefitted households) rather than impact. As Rotoplas aims to invite other partners on addressing this issue, Water and Sanitation initiatives must make economic sense for governments, companies, NGOs and other players to take action.

The capacities of understanding and adopting a methodology that seeks to enhance the potential impact of our products for our beneficiaries has been well identified in our company’s daily operations, creating additional value by focusing on the social, environmental and economic aspects as a whole through enhancing de quality of life of our beneficiaries, but are also environmentally friendly and by accessing to water and sanitation in a sustainable way to impulse the resilience of the communities in which we operate by preparing them not only for water scarcity but also for climate change risks.

We are focused on the generation of sustainable projects that are planned in long terms, strengthening the relationship with our beneficiaries and obtaining a transversal insight during the different stages of our projects.

The cost/efficiency implications must be well communicated to our stake holders to make them realize the difference of the generated impact in installing a product vs implementing a methodology that enhances the impact of a solution through key stages that accompany the beneficiary in the whole process. This will not only aloud us to gain reputation and value in our competitive sector, but also will enhance our competition to do the things better, and in the end this will be translated into a benefit for our country.

Our plans for extending this practice more widely are in current development for other products, and their replicability doesn't compromise the current successful results, identifying that the insights of our methodology have prepared us through the generation of experience in the diverse scenarios that were present in our history of working with communities.

• If the international community wants to achieve the goals related to universal access to safely managed drinking water and sanitation, it must consider other options that complement traditional infrastructure.
• Centralized infrastructure initiatives must be accompanied by decentralized projects, which can deliver access to safely managed drinking water and sanitation in regions where other options may not be viable.
• Nevertheless their origin, WASH projects, must be constructed in close engagement with the communities and households.
• Ecotechnologies such as water harvesting (from micro-catchment to hillside conducts) increase the resilience of households and communities against climate change.
• In sanitation, ecotechnologies for Community Led Total Sanitation can vary from household interventions to community projects, having immediate and secondary impacts that have been researched by the development literature.
• Broad approach and management models can be designed to foster the impacts of water and sanitation interventions.
• Models and initiatives that bolster social impact will be strengthened as long as they are replicated in a growing number of communities and insights from those communities can be recovered and taken into account.
• A multi-stakeholder approach is essential to enhance the potential of WASH initiatives in rural communities.
• The results of those models will vary depending on the characteristics of the communities.
• Stakeholders are invited to design WASH projects that consider incentives for communities, governments, NGOs and social enterprises to engage.
• In any WASH intervention, pre and post phases shall be considered in order to foster the potential impact of interventions
• This model proposes a series of activities that have shown results in three different communities in one of the most underdeveloped regions in Mexico. We expect to replicate these steps in other circumstances and enrich the project within.

https://rotoplas.com/sustentabilidad/