ABSTRACT
UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 aims to “ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all”. Nowhere is the need for safe and accessible sanitation solutions as pressing as in humanitarian emergency settings. Driven by the humanitarian imperative, aid organisations often focus on the speed and scale of delivery of sanitation facilities, which can come at the expense of quality, appropriateness and sustainability of the delivered solutions. Design research that is sensitive to humanitarian context can bridge this gap by systematically involving affected people in the design of the aid they receive. The User-Centred Community Engagement methodology described in this chapter makes use of design research as part of a user-centred approach to inform the design of sanitation facilities in humanitarian crises. In this chapter, the members of Eclipse Experience outline how they developed the methodology with their humanitarian partners, piloted it in crisis contexts and achieved proof of concept. They further share the first steps on their journey to scale with the development and testing of an open-source digital toolkit.
Eclipse Experience is currently further developing the User-Centred Community Engagement methodology as an open-source toolkit for use both within water and sanitation hygiene (WASH) and across humanitarian clusters.
