4.2 Community Oriented Water and Sanitation System in a Rural Community in North East Brazil
This intervention is one of the three components of the case study that focused on the Integrated Rural Sanitation System (SISAR) implemented in the State of Ceara, Brazil. The other two components are the Political-institutional evaluation of the SISAR model, Ceara, Brazil, and the Ethnographic Assessment of the SISAR Model.
The state of Ceará has a large number of small, often distant, rural communities, which face enormous challenges for the delivery of basic water and sanitation services, and SISAR was developed to tackle this problem. This intervention was developed in close collaboration with Ceará’s Water and Sanitation Company (CAGECE), one of DESAFIO’s team members, and its rural sanitation programme SISAR. The intervention included the design and implementation of a water and sanitation system in the small community of Cristais, Ceara. The objective was to assess SISAR/CAGECE’s expertise in developing socio-technical innovations to provide water and sanitation in rural communities. We aimed to ascertain if the innovation, related to the way in which the system is designed, implemented and managed, results in greater community participation and empowerment, higher levels of appropriation of the system by the users, and the impact of the innovation on the vulnerability and living conditions of the community.
The main research work for this study was developed by Barbara Passos and Bernardo Aleixo, with the support of Prof Léo Heller, Dr Sonaly Rezende, and Dr João Luiz Pena, from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil. The work done by Passos and Aleixo was part of their research for a Master in Water and Sanitation, Environment, and Water Resources at UFMG.
This component of the case-study report was now published as:
Passos, B. S., B. Aleixo, J. Ayra, J. L. Pena, S. Rezende, and L. Heller (2015), “Community-oriented water and sanitation system in a rural community in North Eastern Brazil”, in J. E. Castro (Ed.), “The Integrated Rural Sanitation System (SISAR) in Brazil”, WATERLAT-GOBACIT Working Papers, DESAFIO Project Series SPIDES, Vol. 2, No 6, pp. 162-304. Download it here.