SUSTAINABILITY FIELD STUDY - Mercy Corps

Figure 3: Current Condition of Assessed Infrastructure Projects7% 3% School maintenance was secured primarilyExcellentthrough government support or parent6%38%contributions. Throughout the region, parentsGoodregularly contribute to annual maintenanceAveragecosts, which usually support small repairs andPoorpainting that are done by teachers during the16%summer. In Kyrgyzstan, the government hasNot Functioningtaken responsibility for school upkeep and hasNever Usedoutlawed the collecting of money from parents30%for this purpose. The schools that wererehabilitated or built with project support inKyrgyzstan were all in very good condition. Only one school, in the Sari Kenja Community of the RashtValley of Tajikistan, received a “poor” rating. The Department of Education had a project underway toconstruct a new school building in this community, likely lessening community motivation to contributeto maintaining the older school building.Projects addressing basic utilities, such as gas, electricity and water (irrigation and drinking),were highly appreciated in communities and often benefited from community organized repairs.Communities usually appointed water user groups or individuals to care for these projects, and feeswere collected for regular maintenance or on an as needed basis to ensure repairs. In the few caseswhere water projects were not functional due to issues of maintenance, design issues were oftencited, with community members feeling less involved in the process.Projects such as youth and community centers, sports fields, dykes and dams had less clear systemsfor maintenance, and as such, were generally in poorer condition or had not yet had any significantmaintenance done. These types of projects do not traditionally have maintenance structures in place,so it has been harder to ensure sustainability. See Figure 4 for a summary of project quality acrossall categories. 17Figure 4: Project Quality by CategoryEducationWaterUtilitiesSocialHealthRoadsEnvironment0 10 2030Good or ExcellentAveragePoor or Not FunctionalSub-standard construction, due to alack of specialist labor on the project,was cited in one case where conditionwas rated as “poor”. In YaldamichCommunity of Rasht Valley, somerooms of the CAIP-constructedmaternity ward are not being fullyutilized due to problems with theirconstruction. These problems wereattributable to the choice of unskilledlabor from community members,used to reduce overall project costsand help meet community contributionrequirements for the project.5152517 “Utilities” include gas, electricity and communications projects; “Social” projects include youth centers, sport fields, a bathhouse, a communitysquare and a commercial center; “Health” projects include work on medical points and maternity wards; and “Environment” projects includegarbage collection points, dykes, dams and mud-flow channels.18Sustainability Field Study