The goal of this project is to develop and test innovative approaches to integrated micro watershed management in order to improve environmental management and safeguard future water supplies. This pilot project combines an emphasis on managing the upper watershed, including its protection and, if required the reversal of a certain level of environmental degradation; continued emphasis on training and institution building of community water associations to maintain and manage the infrastructure, collect user fees, and promote the best use of the improved potable water supplies; and an emphasis on improving people's habits and practices regarding soil and water conservation and the use of the fauna and flora as appropriate to the upper, middle and lower parts of the micro watershed, including the use and disposal of waste water. In the initial phase, two initiatives were developed in micro watersheds in Morona Santiago (Santa Rosa and Rio Pescado Chico) that benefited a population of 600 people, among Shuar Indians and mestizo communities.
Currently, we are carrying out an initiative in the parish of El Huambi, in the Sucua canton, which finally has a drinking water system. What is hoped for, in this phase of the project, is to attempt to close the natural cycle of water usage in order to achieve a sustainable pattern of consumption. What we take from nature in the upper part of the micro-watershed of the Kayamas River for consumption and transformation, should be returned to it in more or less acceptable conditions, which is why the water is treated at the bottom of the micro-watershed, which in this case means at the discharge end of the sanitary sewer included in the master plan.
