1st Meeting of Sanitation Working Group - NWFP

The 1st meeting of the Provincial Sanitation Working Group was held in Peshawar

on 17th November 2006 under the chairmanship of Sardar Mohammad Idrees, Minister

for Local Government, NWFP. The meeting was organized by the LGE&RDD with the

support of Water and Sanitation Program-South Asia (WSP-SA). The working group

comprising of Secretaries of LGE&RDD, Education, Health, P&D, DG EPA, Chief

Engineer Works & Services (PHED), heads of development projects under LGE&RDD,

Nazim CDG Peshawar, Nazim and Naib Nazims of selected Tehsils, representatives

of NGOs and development partners was notified by the LGE&RDD to assist the

department in preparing the Provincial Sanitation Strategy.

The Provincial Minister in his opening remarks re-iterated the importance of sanitation sector and pledged full support to initiatives that will help the provincial governments in preparing the provincial plans and strategies that will help the service providers (City District and TMAs) to use these as guiding principles and come up with local level action plans to improve the appalling sector condition.

Mr. Masroor Ahmad and Mr. Mark Ellery of WSP-SA presented the salient features

of the recently approved national Sanitation Policy that requires the provincial governments to prepare their provincial sanitation strategies under the overall National Policy framework. The participants were briefed in detail about a unique principle of the policy i.e. "Incentives for Performance Outcomes" in sanitation sector. The Tehsil Nazim of Takht Bhai TMA shared his views on the "Community Lead Total Sanitation" project which is based on rewards for outcomes. This generated interesting discussion and some tehsil nazims showed interest to visit Takht Bhai to see and learn more about this initiative.

WSP-SA presented the terms of references (ToRs) of the working group and sought comments from participants. It was agreed that;

• The strategy would be inclusive and would be based on the past learning in NWFP. Qualitative and quantitative data would be consulted through secondary (PHED documents, studies and base lines of the projects) and primary data would be collected from the field.
• WSP-SA will work closely with a select small core group, formed within the working group, and would come up with the draft strategy by March 2007.