Social Inclusion Is Not an Add-On, It Is How WASH Systems Survive: Lessons from the ECT WASH Program across Indonesia, the Philippines, Myanmar, and Bangladesh

Water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) systems in humanitarian settings are often built with good intentions, but they regularly fail the people who depend on them most. Facilities are physically inaccessible. Communities do not use or maintain them. When the next flood or conflict hits, the infrastructure does not hold.

Why? Because the people with the most at risk including persons with disabilities, women, ethnic minority communities are brought in late, after decisions have already been made. Their role, if any, is to respond to plans designed without them.

"Inclusion is not just an ethical choice. It is a technical necessity for survival in a changing climate."
— Angelina Yusridar Mustafa, MEAL Coordinator for ECT WASH, in EEHF 2026

This article draws on the session Angelina delivered at the Emergency Environmental Health Forum (EEHF) 2026, presenting evidence and practice from the Environmentally Sound, Climate-Resilient, and Transformative (ECT) Humanitarian WASH Program or known as ECT WASH, implemented by ASB in partnership with arche nova, German Toilet Organization (GTO), and local partners across four countries.

The Pattern That Keeps Repeating

WASH responses in crisis settings often follow a predictable pattern. External technical expertise drives the design. Marginalized communities, if included, are consulted at the end. The result is infrastructure that does not fit, communities that do not own it, and systems that fail under pressure.

This cycle is not inevitable. The ECT WASH program set out to interrupt it. Not by improving the technical design in isolation, but by fundamentally changing who holds decision-making power from the very start.

A Twin-Track Approach to Inclusion

The ECT WASH program operates with what Angelina calls a twin-track approach. Both tracks run at the same time. They are not sequential, and neither is optional.

Track 1 means that accessibility and inclusion are built into the tools, standards, and data systems used across the program, not retrofitted later. Track 2 means investing directly in communities who have historically been excluded, so they have the skills and platforms to lead, not just participate.

Neither track works alone. Systemic change without community power produces policies that communities do not own. Community capacity without systemic change produces leaders with nowhere to lead.

The Inclusive Green Humanitarian Framework

The ECT WASH program combines social inclusion with a broader Inclusive Green Humanitarian approach. This framework holds three elements in productive tension:

The framework is built on a simple but rigorous logic:

• A WASH system that is green but not inclusive risks deepening existing inequality, climate-friendly infrastructure that only some people can access or use.
• A WASH system that is inclusive but not climate-informed may not survive the next extreme weather event or displacement crisis.
• Only when all three elements work together does the system become genuinely resilient.

Making Risk Visible: NEAT+ and Community-Led Assessment

A key tool in ECT WASH is NEAT+ (Nexus Environmental Assessment Tool Plus), a climate risk screening framework adapted for humanitarian settings. What makes the ECT WASH use of NEAT+ different is that it does not sit with technical experts alone.

Communities including persons with disabilities, women's groups, and ethnic minority leaders were trained to use NEAT+ alongside facilitators. This meant climate risk was assessed from the perspectives of those most exposed to it, not just those with formal environmental training.

"When the people most at risk are part of the decision-making, the solutions are simply more relevant, more used, and more sustainable."
— Angelina Yusridar Mustafa

NEAT+ was combined with community-based disaster risk assessments, which center local knowledge and lived experience. Together, they produced a fuller, more accurate picture of risk and a planning process that communities shaped from the beginning.

Four Contexts, One Consistent Shift

The ECT WASH program operated across four distinct humanitarian contexts in Asia. The inclusion approach was not applied uniformly. It was adapted to each country's specific risks, social dynamics, and displacement realities.

From Passive Participation to Decision-Making Power

The most significant change the program tracked was not in water points constructed or latrines built. It was in who held power at the table where decisions were made.

Marginalized communities including persons with disabilities, women, and ethnic minority groups took on formal roles in local coordination mechanisms. They shaped decisions on preparedness, emergency response, and infrastructure design. This is what Angelina describes as the real transformation: not better buildings, but different decision-makers.

Resilience Is Social, Not Just Structural

The humanitarian sector tends to measure resilience in physical terms: how many water points remained operational, how many latrines survived the flood. ECT WASH found something that is harder to measure but equally important.

"Resilience is also deeply social. It is built through trust, through inclusion, and through better decision-making processes."
— Angelina Yusridar Mustafa

When the people with the most at stake are inside the planning process, not outside it, outcomes are more relevant and more sustainable. Communities maintain infrastructure they helped design. They activate early warning systems they helped build. They coordinate during crises because they already have relationships and trust.

The Case for Investment

Inclusion is sometimes framed as a cost like extra consultation time, more facilitation, more complex coordination. The ECT WASH experience presents a different economic argument.

By investing in inclusive, climate-resilient design from the beginning rather than retrofitting later, programs maximize the return on humanitarian investment. Infrastructure that communities helped design is infrastructure they use, maintain, and protect.

Ethics Were Not Afterthoughts Either

The program applied a rigorous do-no-harm approach throughout. All participation from women's groups and organisations of persons with disabilities was voluntary and genuinely meaningful, not performative.

The program actively managed two risks that inclusive programming often neglects: power dynamics (who dominates when diverse groups are in the same room) and participation fatigue (the exhaustion of communities asked to attend endless consultations with little outcome). Both were addressed through dedicated facilitation support and long-term partnerships with trusted local organizations.

Collaboration with established local partners meant the program did not extract community knowledge and carry it elsewhere. Knowledge stayed with the community.

A Global Blueprint, Not Just an Asia Model

The ECT WASH model was tested under significant stress such as floods, droughts, heat waves, active conflict, forced displacement. It was adapted to four very different country contexts without losing its core logic.

The core components which are accessible climate risk screening, inclusive facilitation, OPD and women-led coordination can be integrated into existing WASH and disaster risk reduction (DRR) systems with minimal additional cost. No new parallel structures are needed. The approach plugs into what already exists and makes it work better.

"This isn't just an Asia model. It's a global blueprint for locally-led climate programming."
— Angelina Yusridar Mustafa

What Still Needs to Change

Angelina was clear that field-level innovation is not enough on its own. Even when communities hold genuine decision-making power within a program, they often encounter policy environments that do not recognize or sustain that power.

Three things emerged as necessary for this approach to scale and last:

• Policy recognition of locally-led action. Donor and UN system policies need to formally recognize OPD leadership and women-led coordination as standard practice, not good practice to be documented and forgotten.
• Funding for facilitation. Inclusive programming requires skilled facilitation. This is a cost that must be budgeted not absorbed as overhead or squeezed out in efficiency drives.
• Long-term partnership, not project cycles. Trust between facilitators, local partners, and communities is built over years. Short project cycles break exactly the relationships on which resilience depends.

Conclusion: Inclusion Is the Strategy

The ECT WASH program offers evidence across floods, typhoons, conflict, and displacement, that social inclusion is not a values statement added to a technical proposal. It is the mechanism by which WASH systems become resilient.

Persons with disabilities, women, and ethnic minority communities are not populations to serve. They are the designers, planners, and coordinators who make systems work. When they are inside the decision-making space from the beginning, outcomes are more accessible, more used, and more durable.

"If we want a WASH system that survives 2026 and beyond, we must stop treating social inclusion as an afterthought. By placing marginalized leaders at the center of the design, we build systems that are truly resilient."
— Angelina Yusridar Mustafa

The shift the program achieved that from communities as passive recipients to communities as active decision-makers is not just an ethical achievement. It is a practical blueprint for climate-resilient humanitarian programming anywhere in the world.