Peru SANBASUR Rural Sanitation Financing Mechanisms

During several decades of attempts to deal with the ever-increasing basic sanitation problem in rural areas of Peru, many different strategies have been applied with limited apparent effectiveness. Although the access of rural families to water increased to 50.6% and access to sanitation to 39.5% between 1988 and 1998, there are still large gaps in the coverage of basic sanitation services, particularly as far as latrines are concerned. These gaps are even greater if the quality and use of these services is considered, since it was estimated in 2001 that 60.3% of the latrines were in a terrible state or of no use. Cusco ranks 14th among the 24 departments of Peru with the highest abject poverty rates (65.6% of the population). There is an average 22.3% gap between poor people’s income and the abject poverty line and a critical 9.5% inequality rate among the poor, who are concentrated in the rural sector where, of every 1000 children ever born, 71 die before they are one year old; of every 100 children under five years of age, 53 suffer from chronic malnutrition; 42% of the women and 17% of the men are illiterate, having only completed the first 4 years of school and 35.4% of the children and adolescents (ages 5 – 19) do not attend school. In this context, the SANBASUR project has been applying and validating its overall involvement strategy for the promotion of basic rural sanitation and improving access to basic sanitation services for poor rural families. To this end, it encouraged the development of essential skills in the community in managing basic sanitation services, focusing on demand and demonstrating technical, social and financial sustainability, thus permitting the direct and indirect replication of the project and allowing the local population to gain more access to their social, technical and political rights.