Socio-Economic Challenges for Sustainable Community Development and WASH: A study from Gujrat, Pakistan

Abstract

Sustainable community development is an interactive and continuous process that manages human natural, financial and capital needs to ensure availability of adequate resources for current and future generations. Throughout the world, the sustainability challenges within the community context are multilayered and present serious threats to socio-economic and health conditions of people. In developing countries like Pakistan, a vicious cycle of socio-economic burden significantly associated with unhealthy water, sanitation and hygiene conditions & practices that largely impacted the process of sustainable community development. To understand the socio-economic impacts of WASH this quantitative study applied a stratified random sampling technique to obtain the primary data from the target population. The data analyzed through SPSS 21 and smartPLS 3 which indicate the goodness of excellent fit model values and within prescribed limits such as Chi-square (5217.391), d_ULS (1.791), d_G (0.651), SRMS (0.052) and RMS-Theta (0.123). Furthermore, the study hypothesis (H1, H2, H3) were also supported that the higher level of knowledge, attitude and practice regarding WASH have significant socio-economic impacts on sustainable community development. Study strongly recommended that to attain sustainable community development, it is the need of time that such discourses may start at core level for better understanding and achieve targets at individual, family and community level.