Despite its perceived importance, the evidence suggests that community engagement in all sectors of humanitarian response is often limited and rarely monitored or evaluated. Sanitation projects seem to involve the community only in the construction phase as a paid labour force, or as a cash-for-work initiative.
A project in Delhi is retraining people who clean human excrement with their bare hands to find work as housekeepers. The training is the result of Shahdara district magistrate Kumar Mahesh’s determination to end manual scavenging. The project team found it hard to identify manual scavengers in Shahdara as many (most of whom are Dalits) are too ashamed to admit their occupation. But they finally managed to persuade 28 people to enrol for the part-time course where they learn housekeeping skills enabling them to leave the dehumanising work of scavenging behind.
Rural Cambodia is home to the largest proportion of individuals practicing open defecation in Southeast Asia. The Cambodia Rural Sanitation and Hygiene Improvement Program (CRSHIP) has sought to address harmful sanitation practices by increasing access to improved sanitation and promoting proper hygiene in rural target areas.
Ensuring everyone has access to appropriate WASH facilities is one of the most fundamental challenges in international development. Researchers and funders need to consider carefully where there is the need for new primary evidence, such as impact evaluations, and for new evidence syntheses, such as systematic reviews. 3ie evidence gap maps are collections of evidence from impact evaluations and systematic reviews. They highlight where there are sufficient impact evaluations to support systematic reviews and where more studies are needed.
This is the first of two blogs written about the “Sanitation and health evidence consensus meeting”, convened by the World Health Organization (WHO) in Seattle on May 24 and 25, 2018.
I attended the 'CLTS Sharing and Learning Workshop' organised by the CLTS Knowledge Hub on 8th July, 2018 at Nakuru, Kenya – the day before the WEDC conference started. The workshop saw an interesting mix of participants including policymakers, practitioners, researchers and social entrepreneurs. Participants identified three broad themes for the day and then shared their experiences on these.
I had the opportunity to attend the 41st WEDC Conference held at Nakuru, Kenya 9 – 13th July 2018 . The theme of the five-day event was, 'Transformation towards sustainable and resilient WASH services'. The power-packed week saw more than 160 presentations, 29 side events, 21 capacity building workshops, exhibitions and posters - there was something for everyone! I was thrilled to interact with participants who were working on diverse themes, but with one common objective. As we all eagerly await next year's conference, here are my reflections on some of my conference highlights.
The Urban Sanitation Research Initiative is a research programme designed to drive pro-poor sector change in urban sanitation in Bangladesh, Ghana, Kenya and globally. It is led by World Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP) in collaboration with key in-country partners, and core-funded by UK aid from the UK government to run from 2017–2020.
This BBC news article tells the tragic story of a five-year-old boy, Michael Komape, drowning in a poorly maintained school pit latrine in northern South Africa in 2014. It highlights a serious national problem: less than a fifth of schools have access to a latrine and where they do many have been found to be unsafe, which has resulted in another similar tragic death of a young girl this year.
During the East and Southern Africa Regional Rural Sanitation Workshop organised by the CLTS Knowledge Hub in Arusha (hosted by SNV Tanzania) we heard how successful achievement of SDG 6.2 requires efforts to reach the ‘last mile’ with adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene.
