Prey Veng NGO Applies WASH Training to Rural Areas

Soun Chanthou, an employee of an NGO based in the Prey Veng province, recently completed ANSA’s WASH and Human Rights training. The training, which occurred in a blended online and offline format, gave Mr. Chanthou the opportunity to learn about accountability in the WASH sector. As an NGO employee, Mr. Chanthou has connections to numerous development actors in the WASH sector, and believes that ANSA’s focus on accountability will be very useful in future work with these other stakeholders

Chanthou, however, also sees the training as opportunity for improvement within his own organization, “After learning from ANSA, I shared knowledge on WASH to my colleagues in the office so that they have the initiative to implement WASH in our next project,” he said. And the results already look promising, with Mr. Chanthou’s NGO disseminating sanitation and hygiene projects in the countryside. Despite early success, Mr. Chanthou understands that WASH accountability is a complex issue, and NGOs have limited ability to ensure access to clean water, sanitation, and hygiene. 

Looking forward, Mr. Chanthou believes that WASH accountability needs to become a priority at the national level, “We have an existing mechanism [at the] provincial level of networking between CSOs and provincial departments of information and rural development,” he notes, “but there is not yet [a] network between the national and sub-national level.”

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