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Three projects have received funding support from the Sanitation Financing Partnership Trust Fund, created last year by the Asian Development Bank, in recognition that complex urban and coastal environments require new approaches to septage management.
The Fund had been created to provide safe sanitation to families in Asia’s cities and rural communities who still lack access to basic sanitation facilities and services. ADB is leveraging the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's $15 million contribution to finance more than $28 million in non-sewered sanitation and septage management projects across the region in the next five years, a note said.
In Asia and the Pacific, around 1.7 billion people still lack access to safe toilets or latrines, 780 million people still practice open defecation, and around 80 per cent of wastewater is discharged into the environment without treatment.
Funded projects
The projects receiving the funding include the South Asia Urban Knowledge Hub (k-hub), a network of four research and training institutions in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka supported by ADB to facilitate information and exchange within South Asia among city managers, utility staff, policy makers, academics and the private sector for improved service delivery.
The k-hub activities will include support to national centers in developing business plans that structures the national centers’ work and capacity needs for promoting innovative urban sanitation.
The trust fund has set also aside $2 million for ADB’s Facility for Pilot and Demonstration Activity, it said. Here it would support the testing and validation of pilot approaches to policies, technologies and business models to improve sanitation management and water services delivery with the intent to replicate and scale-up successful approaches across the region.
An additional $1.6 million grant from the Trust Fund will support pilot innovations in sanitation and septage management as part of a planned ADB loan to Bangladesh for coastal town infrastructure improvements. The new grant will support pilot projects in eight towns to improve septage collection and treatment systems, the note added.
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