Unincorporated area
In law, an unincorporated area is a region of land that is not governed by a local municipal corporation; similarly an unincorporated community is a settlement that is not governed by its own local municipal corporation, but rather is administered as part of larger administrative divisions, such as a township, parish, borough, county, city, canton, state, province or country. Occasionally, municipalities dissolve or disincorporate, which may happen if they become fiscally insolvent, and services become the responsibility of a higher administration. Widespread unincorporated communities and areas are a distinguishing feature of the United States and Canada. In most other countries of the world, there are either no unincorporated areas at all, or these are very rare; typically remote, outlying, sparsely populated or uninhabited areas.
Water supply and sanitation in the Dominican Republic
Since 1998 USAID has provided technical assistance to INAPA to introduce what it calls a Total Community Participation approach in rural water supply and sanitation. The project served as a laboratory for INAPA, whose activities in rural areas had been limited to water supply, to engage in community participation, in rural sanitation and hygiene promotion. USAID first supported a pilot project for nine rural communities with a total of 700 families in Hato Mayor Province with the support of Catholic Relief Services and a Dominican NGO. From 2002 onwards, USAID and the NGO Family Health International supported INAPA in replicating the approach in other parts of the country. A 2006 evaluation showed that six of the nine pilot communities did not have working systems. The reasons include inappropriate design - pumps and inverters burned out - and the stealing of solar panels. However, the evaluation also showed that the community-based approach has been adopted by other stakeholders, such as CAASD for rural projects in the province of Santo Domingo, an INAPA project supported by Spanisch cooperation and the Peace Corps.