Water and Sanitation features
International symposia highlight sustainable WASH services
03 Feb 10
After decades of investment in water, sanitation and hygiene, levels of sustainability are still unacceptably low in the WASH sector. In part this is due to a focus on building water systems and sanitation infrastructure rather than on delivering services. Two symposia this year will discuss how to change this and strengthen the shift towards sustainable WASH service delivery.
Contest: Tell us a story – for pride and a prize
03 Feb 10
Source Bulletin is looking for stories about communities and interventions that helped (or failed!) to improve the sanitation and hygiene situation. Such stories provide valuable lessons from WASH experiences and practices.
Ethiopia: the success of the ArborLoo latrine
03 Feb 10
The Government of Ethiopia does not endorse subsidies for sanitation and households must therefore purchase slabs and pay other building costs. Many private artisans have been trained to make slabs, but materials are often hard to come by. Project partner organisations still have to assist in getting materials, and often have to cover the cost of slabs for the poorest families. Slowly, however, the ArborLoo is becoming a part of Ethiopian rural culture by providing a payback for efforts made.
Vietnam: a toilet mason’s business career
03 Feb 10
Thuy Thanh Ky is a mason in Quang Nam Province, Vietnam. He is 43 years old and has a completed secondary school education. He has a wife and four children. Mr. Ky, from Binh Trieu Commune, Thang Binh District, was a poor farmer until he took up part-time masonry in 1996 to make some extra money. His business went well and after two years he became a full-time mason.
Water-related lessons for Haiti: listening and livelihoods hold the key
03 Feb 10
Listen to people about the future of their livelihoods – that could be the best advice for the teams in Haiti responding to the earthquake disaster. By late January the International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimated that there were 370,000 people living in more than 300 makeshift settlements under improvised shelter with no access to water supplies.
South Africa: Citizens’ voice acted on in regulation of services
03 Nov 09
“Raising the Citizens’ Voice in the Regulation of Services” is a public education initiative by the national regulator in South Africa. It supports a bottom-up approach to water services regulation by actively involving citizens in local monitoring of water and sanitation services.
“The worst job in the world”
03 Nov 09
About 1.3 million Indians are still trapped in the degrading and dangerous job of manual scavenging of human excreta sixteen long years after the country passed a law to make the health threatening job illegal.
Nepal: Children from 200 schools spread messages on point-of-use water treatment and hand washing
03 Nov 09
Addressing safe water options at school in Nepal is a bigger challenge than at household level. No safe water products on the market can handle the high volume of water demand in an average school with 300 students, particularly in light of the operation and maintenance challenges.
South Africa: municipal failures put decentralisation at risk
03 Nov 09
Water service delivery failures at municipal level are a widespread and fundamental problem in South Africa. All year (2009) there have been recurring stories in the press of poor communities receiving sub-standard basic services, and sometimes no services at all. Municipalities continue to receive qualified audits, to have service delivery backlogs that have scarcely reduced in a decade and to be plagued by poor physical infrastructure.
India: Moving from water scarcity to security
12 Aug 09
Communities in Tikamgarh district of Bundelkhand, India have been working to develop drinking water security plans, which they are confident of implementing with financial support from government programmes.
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