Water Currents: Citywide Inclusive Sanitation
USAID is committed to exploring new ideas to achieving increased access to urban sanitation services.
USAID is committed to exploring new ideas to achieving increased access to urban sanitation services.
Are you a practitioner or theoretician of water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) systems or the application of systems approaches to WASH? IRC in collaboration with several partners will be hosting a major symposium on building and strengthening strong systems to deliver safe and sustainable WASH services for everyone. The WASH systems symposium "All systems go!" will be held from 12-14 March 2019 in The Hague, the Netherlands.
This research brief presents the initial findings and lessons learned from a study of the stakeholder relationships and key success factors for the Rural Sanitation and Hygiene (RuSH) Network in Cambodia. The Royal Government of Cambodia’s National Strategy for Rural Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene 2011-2025 has set a clear but ambitious sector vision: “Every person in rural communities has access to safe water supply and sanitation services and lives in a hygienic environment by 2025.” However, the RuSH subsector in Cambodia faces significant challenges to achieving that vision.
Sustainable services remain a daunting challenge in the water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) sector. Traditionally, national and local governments, WASH service providers, and development partners have focused on the construction of WASH facilities and the expansion of service coverage. Less emphasis has been placed on sustaining and maintaining existing WASH services. As a result, failure rates of water supply and sanitation systems continue to be high.
Ato Mantegabtot Negash, the manager of the Gazer Town Water Utility. Together with three mechanics and two bill collectors, he is responsible for providing water services to more than 5,000 people in Gazer town, the woreda (district) capital of South Ari woreda in Southern Nation, Nationalities and Peoples Regional State of Ethiopia. Meeting him in his office recently, he expressed his frustration with his job.
Asset inventory is essential in Ethiopia to develop more realistic planning to increase functionality as well as coverage.
All of us who work on understanding and implementing development from a systems perspective can rattle off a litany of arguments as to why traditional approaches don’t work: linear results chains don’t reflect reality. People and their motivations and power dynamics matter. Unanticipated feedback loops can scuttle the best-planned activities. The list goes on, filled with jargon-laden concepts like “emergence,” “causal loops,” “dynamic modeling,” and “complex adaptation.”
That was the theme behind the first Collective Action Workshop held in Phnom Penh, Cambodia last month. Dozens of actors from Cambodia’s rural water, sanitation, and hygiene [WASH] sector came together to chart a more collaborative effort towards meeting the sector’s shared vision of universal sanitation by 2025 and the goals outlined in the 2014 – 2018 National Action Plan [NAP].
Political drivers, including SDG indicators, directly impact sanitation efforts on the ground.
Here we look at shared sanitation at the national, district, and household levels in Ethiopia, and why it should not be overlooked by the SDGs.