News from Stockholm Water Week - Thursday 21 August 2008

Readers of yesterdays “News from Stockholm” will, hopefully, have picked up on the sense of vitality and re-connection with reality engendered by a number of the presentations at the third day of the 18th Stockholm World Water Week.

Day 4 contained a lot more technical discussion - as valuable, but different. There was a sense of progress in that some good questions were being asked, this itself being an indicator of progress and a welcome departure from over-simplistic generalisations that on occasion can characterise gatherings like this one in Stockholm.

Here is a small selection of the quality of questions being asked:

• If a community has become free of open defecation (ODF), why should external interventionists seek to press communities to rise up a sanitation ladder? Isn’t “ODF” job done?
• Why are we unable or unwilling to learn from other sectors (HIV/AIDS, and other health arenas especially) about the work that they have done on sustainable behaviour change? There must be lots to learn from reduced HIV/AIDS prevalence, or from malaria net scale up, so why don’t we?
• We can all (probably) accept that water and sanitation are human rights; more still, that (at least in some contexts) basing activities on this premise can help move service provision forward. But what can and should donors/INGOs be doing to help move this forward where it is helpful to do so? Can they support accountability generating activities - are they mature enough to accept that non-hardware activities of this sort are both legitimate and useful?

Actually, if you want to join us in looking at some of these questions, do let us know!

But it wasn’t all sweetness and light. One presentation early in the day served as a stark reminder that, sadly, not all have learned the lessons of the last International Decade (i.e. the 1980s). How not to do it, lesson 1: make your water supply project deliver an isolated item of hardware with no participation, no back-up support to the community, remote from involvement of local government, devoid of considerations of hygiene and sanitation, and then think that a 40% failure rate in the first year or so “isn’t too bad, we hoped for more”... you will see why there was some twitching in the audience.

The fact is, and one reason why Stockholm 2008 has been a great success is that examples like this are few and far between – and that this (we believe) is a good reflection of progress being made in the watsan sectors.