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.

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.

Following our recent East and Southern Africa regional rural sanitation workshop in Tanzania in April 2018, we are delighted to share with you the first official output from the event, a learning brief which presents the common challenges and barriers to achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6.2 that the workshop participants identified across the region.

Amongst other things, four key issues emerged:

A wealth of knowledge emerged from our recent East and Southern Africa Regional Sharing and Learning Workshop on CLTS and Rural Sanitation in Arusha, Tanzania in April.

We have so much we want to share with you – the workshop report, hunter gatherer reports, blogs, articles, photos and videos – that we are setting up a dedicated webpage in the next month. We will keep you posted on this. But in the meantime here are three short video interviews captured at the event with experts across the region talking on a diversity of key issues.