Unincorporated area
An unincorporated community is one general term for a geographic area having a common social identity without municipal organization or official political designation (i.e., incorporation as a city or town). There are two main types of unincorporated communities:Due to differences in state laws regarding the incorporation of communities, there is a great variation in the distribution and nature of unincorporated areas. Unincorporated regions are essentially nonexistent in seven of the northeastern states. All of the land in New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and Rhode Island, and nearly all of the land in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Vermont, is part of an incorporated area of some type. In these areas, types (and official names) of local government entities can vary. In New England (which includes five of those eight states, plus the less fully incorporated state of Maine), local municipalities are known as towns or cities, and most towns are administered by a form of direct democracy, such as the open town meeting or representative town meeting. Larger towns in New England may be incorporated as cities, with some form of mayor-council government. In New Jersey multiple types exist as well, such as city, township, town, borough, or village, but these differences are in the structure of the legislative branches, not in the powers or functions of the entities themselves.
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.