The United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene Partnerships and Learning for Sustainability (WASHPaLS) Project was a five-year task order awarded to Tetra Tech on September 16, 2016, under USAID’s Water and Development Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity Contract (WADI). Tetra Tech implemented the project in collaboration with several nongovernmental organizations and small business partners—Aquaya Institute, FHI 360, FSG, and Iris Group—that contributed expertise in state-of-the-art water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) programming and research. Distinguished academics, practitioners, and policymakers from across the WASH sector provided expert perspectives regularly to the project through an internal research working group and an external Advisory Board.
WASHPaLS supported USAID’s goal of reducing morbidity and mortality in children under five by ensuring USAID programming employs high-impact, evidence-based environmental health and WASH interventions. WASHPaLS identified and shared best practices for achieving sustainability, scale, and impact by generating evidence to support the reduction of open defecation and the movement of communities up the sanitation ladder, while also focusing on novel approaches for reducing infants’ and young children’s (IYC) exposure to faeces. Specifically, WASHPaLS:
1. Offered USAID missions and technical bureaus ready access to thought leaders and analytical expertise across a wide range of WASH themes, in response to their needs (Component 1);
2. Generated evidence through implementation research to increase the sector’s understanding of and approaches to sustainable WASH services; the effectiveness of behavioural and market-oriented approaches to sanitation; and measures to disrupt pathways of faecal exposure experienced by IYC (Component 2), specifically focusing on:
- Examination and analysis of Community-Led Total Sanitation including a dedicated information and communications technology activity (Task 2.1),
- Exploration of market-based sanitation (Task 2.2), and
- Testing approaches to improve hygienic environments for IYC (Task 2.3), also referred to as Safe Play Spaces;
3. Administered a small grants program on innovations in hygiene behaviour change (Component 3); and
4. Engaged and partnered with national and global stakeholders to promote the use and application of project-generated evidence and global best practices by practitioners and policymakers, tapping into broad coalitions and dynamic partnerships (Component 4).
The WASHPaLS Final Report covers the full period of implementation from September 16, 2016, to February 24, 2022, and presents the project’s major achievements and notable challenges.
