Water.org hosted more than 130 participants in an engaging day of conversation and cross-learning from a broad range of sectors, including finance, multilaterals, government, research and academia, and practitioners. 

A special thank you to Shri. Arun Baroka, the Joint Secretary of the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation, for delivering the keynote address. He highlighted that India has achieved 95.98% ODF coverage to date, compared to 38% ODF coverage in October 2014. With such success of the Swachh Bharat Mission, the focus now is on creating sustainability.   

The key themes of the day’s conversations revolved around:

• Sustainability: strategies around ODF, ODF-Sustainability, and Water

• Enabling regulations for WSS lending: removing the stigma around the profitability of WSS lending 

• Scale: integrating water and sanitation into lending to allow it to scale on an auto-pilot basis

• Communication: knowledge sharing around WASH credit financing, listening to consumers, two-way communications, meeting aspirations and changing the mindset from beneficiary to customer. 

• Capacity building: strengthening the development of enterprises and banks 

• Ecosystem: building a sustainable WASH ecosystem by evolving the Swachh Bharat Mission to be more of a grassroots focus and the policy level changes needed to make both financing and product offerings for WASH more inclusive to deepen the reach and impact in the ODF-Sustainability era

• Financing strategies: innovative financing mechanisms for WSS, including impact investing impact bonds, the need for financing households as well as enterprises, encouraging banks to lend and sharing appropriate risk mitigation strategies 

Additional Insights:

• Ms. R. Vimala, CEO of Maharashtra State Rural Livelihood Mission, shared her thoughts and insights from the Forum and can be read here:  https://vimshine.blogspot.com/2018/11/lend-for-water-and-sanitation-lend-for.html
  

Presentations and photos: 

• To view presentations and photos from the event, please click here.
  

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