This 5-year capacity building and research project was developed by Prof. Damir Brdjanovic, Professor of Sanitary Engineering at UNESCO-IHE and his team.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced this grant at the AfricaSan conference in Rwanda as part of more than $40 million in new investments launching its Water, Sanitation, & Hygiene strategy.
"UNESCO-IHE and our partners: the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) in Thailand, the Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB) in Indonesia, the International Institute of Water and Environmental Engineering (2iE) in Burkina Faso, the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Ghana, Makerere University Institute of Environmental, the Natural Resources (MUIENR) in Uganda, the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa, the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) in Brazil and the Universidad del Valle in Colombia, have been working hand in hand with the Gates Foundation in developing the project ideas and shaping it in a way to address the needs of the 2.6 billion people worldwide who do not have access to improved sanitation," Prof. András Szöllösi-Nagy, Rector at UNESCO-IHE explained.
Research within the project is clustered around five major themes: smart sanitation provision for slums and informal settlements; emergency sanitation following natural and anthropological disasters; resource recovery oriented decentralized sanitation; low
The total project budget is US$11.1 million. Rather than classical input-funding, the project is partially based on output-based funding. Such innovative financial engineering provides incentives to excel and outperform the project expectations. The project will run until 2016 and will be jointly executed by UNESCO-IHE (principal grantee) and its eight partners from developing countries in sub- Saharan Africa, South\East Asia and South America.
