Study Highlights Limited Progress in WASH Access Among Sub-Saharan African Cities

George Washington University Study Highlights Limited Progress in Water and Sanitation Access Among Major Sub-Saharan African Cities | Source: George Washington University, School of Public Health |

Sub-Saharan Africa’s urban population is predicted to nearly triple by 2050, increasing from 414 million to over 1.2 billion. This growth challenges municipalities attempting to provide basic access to water supply and sanitation (WS&S). A new analysis published in BMC Public Health by researchers at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services (SPHHS) looks at how well cities in sub-Saharan Africa are doing when it comes to providing their urban residents with access to basic public health infrastructure.

Photo credit: Jay Graham

Mike Hopewell, a recent graduate of the MPH program at SPHHS, and Jay Graham, an SPHHS assistant professor of environmental and occupational health, estimated changes in access to water supply and sanitation in the largest cities across sub-Saharan Africa between 2000 and 2012. They then explored the relationship of city-level and country-level factors to progress or regression in these cities.

The authors found that cities appeared to be making the most progress in gaining access to WS&S along metrics that reflect specified targets of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), global targets for improved wellbeing that countries aim to achieve by 2015. Nearly half of the cities, however, did not make progress in reducing open defecation or the time households spent collecting water. This may reflect a focus on “improved” services that are MDG targets while other measures, potentially more relevant to the extreme poor, are being neglected. This study highlights the need to better characterize access, beyond definitions of improved and unimproved, as well as the need to target resources to cities where changes in WS&S access have stalled, or in some cases regressed.

A gender-inclusive approach in practice: communal sanitation

WSUP believes that the issue of gender inclusion is fundamental to effective WASH service provision. To mark International Women’s Day and to recognise the importance of this issue, we have produced a new Practice Note which provides a contextual background on gender issues in WASH, before illustrating what a gender-inclusive approach looks like in practice. This Practice Note is based on direct experience of communal sanitation in Maputo (Mozambique) and Naivasha (Kenya), and demonstrates how the concerns of women and girls can be addressed at every step of programme planning and implementation.

This is a free resource and is available for download by clicking on the image above or visiting our online resource library.

Cartoon contest – break the silence about toilets and sanitation in India!

With your creativity we want to break the silence about toilets and sanitation in India! 

The Sustainable Sanitation Alliance (SuSanA) and GIZ together with Goethe Institute Max Müller, the Indian Institute for Cartoonists and EAWAG/Sandec invite creative minds to submit fun and striking ideas about toilets and sanitation in the form of Cartoons, Caricatures or Infographics that will create a humorous atmosphere around sanitation concerns. Because sanitation in India is still a taboo; the media doesn’t address the issue often enough and people feel uncomfortable talking about it, even though it’s an issue that concerns all of us – several times a day, every day. We are flexible with the entry’s format as long as it:

Surprises the silent majority and makes them laugh and talk about sanitation!

So what’s the cartoon competition all about?

• The idea is to have a cartoon competition on the topic of sanitation and toilets.
• The inspiration comes from the ‘Reinvented Toilets’ Programme by the Gates Foundation.
• The approach taken by the Cartoon-Competition is, however, one both smaller in scale and more abstract in style.
• The essence of the endeavour is to break the taboo that surrounds talking about sanitation and toilets in India with humor and laughter.

The deadline for submitting entries is Monday, 10 March, 2014 (midnight Indian Standard Time).

Tender for external evaluation WASH Facility: Sierra Leone

Adam Smith International are procuring for external evaluators (consultants or firm) to evaluate the Sierra Leone WASH Facility.

The Facility, which has a total budget of £5 million (US$ 8.4 million), is managed and administered by Adam Smith International, on behalf of DfID and the Government of Sierra Leone (particularly the Ministry of Water Resources, and Ministry of Health & Sanitation).

The evaluation covers the Facility mechanism itself, and its portfolio of 36 projects funded by small grants all less than £200,000 (US$ 330,000) each.

It is expected the evaluation will require approximately 60-80 days total level of effort.  Organisations or individuals that have been financed by the WASH Facility cannot apply.

Deadline for applications:  6pm (GMT) 14th March 2014

For full details and application guidelines please consult the attached Terms of Reference.

Please do not send applications or requests for information to Sanitation Updates.

“SuperAmma” campaign results in significant improvements in people’s handwashing behaviour

“SuperAmma” campaign results in significant improvements in people’s handwashing behaviour | Source: SHARE, Feb 27 2014 |

A unique handwashing campaign jointly funded by SHARE and the Wellcome Trust has shown for the first time that using emotional motivators – such as feelings of disgust and nurture – rather than health messages, can result in significant, long-lasting improvements in people’s handwashing behaviour, and could in turn help to reduce the risk of infectious diseases. 

“Every year, diarrhoea kills around 800,000 children under 5 years old. Handwashing with soap could prevent perhaps a third of these deaths”, explains study author Dr Val Curtis, from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).

“Handwashing campaigns usually try to educate people with health messages about germs and diseases, but so far efforts to change handwashing behaviour on a large scale have had little success. Understanding the motivating factors for routine hand washing is essential to any initiative likely to achieve lasting behaviour change.”

An evaluation of the behaviour-change intervention, published by the Lancet Global Health journal today, shows that 6 months after the campaign was rolled out in 14 villages in rural India, rates of handwashing with soap increased by 31%, compared to communities without the programme, and were sustained for 12 months.

Toilets, trash and social status: the top 10 emergency hygiene challenges

Toilets, trash and social status: the top 10 emergency hygiene challenges | Source/Complete article: Kathy Migiro, Thomson Reuters Foundation | Feb 17 2014

Excerpts:  NAIROBI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – More than 900 beneficiaries, field practitioners and donors named their most pressing gaps in emergency water, sanitation and hygiene promotion (WASH) services in a 2013 survey.

Congolese refugees gather around dry water taps at Bukanga camp, Uganda, July 17, 2013. REUTERS/James Akena

The Humanitarian Innovation Fund (HIF), which carried out the survey, plans to solve them through open innovation, where grants of up to $20,000 are given to the best new ideas.

Here are the top 10 gaps HIF will tackle (in no particular order):

1)    Latrine lighting - In many refugee camps, latrines are not lit at night making them dangerous for women to use.

Challenge: To light communal latrines at night in a cheap and sustainable manner.

2)    Space saving jerrycan - In emergencies, agencies traditionally buy and distribute jerrycans, which can mean transporting 15 or 20 litres of air. Collapsible jerrycans only last a couple of months before they start leaking.

Challenge: To design a 15 litre jerrycan, costing less than $5, with limited volume when stored, lasting one year.

3)    Excreta disposal in urban emergencies - Earthquakes and floods often cut off urban water supplies and damage toilets. When large numbers of displaced people gather in safe places like schools, sanitation facilities get overwhelmed. Many agencies build raised latrines. But they need to be emptied frequently, with waste being dumped in purpose-built pits or rivers, creating health risks.

Challenges: To develop new products to provide safe excreta disposal in urban environments after disasters. Solutions should consider not only containment, but also emptying and disposal mechanisms.

Child Feces Disposal Practices in Rural Orissa: A Cross Sectional Study

Child Feces Disposal Practices in Rural Orissa: A Cross Sectional Study. PLoS One, Feb 2014.

• Full text

Fiona Majorin, et al

Background – An estimated 2.5 billion people worldwide lack access to improved sanitation facilities. While large-scale programs in some countries have increased latrine coverage, they sometimes fail to ensure optimal latrine use, including the safe disposal of child feces, a significant source of exposure to fecal pathogens. We undertook a cross-sectional study to explore fecal disposal practices among children in rural Orissa, India in villages where the Government of India’s Total Sanitation Campaign had been implemented at least three years prior to the study.

Methods and Findings – We conducted surveys with heads of 136 households with 145 children under 5 years of age in 20 villages. We describe defecation and feces disposal practices and explore associations between safe disposal and risk factors. Respondents reported that children commonly defecated on the ground, either inside the household (57.5%) for pre-ambulatory children or around the compound (55.2%) for ambulatory children. Twenty percent of pre-ambulatory children used potties and nappies; the same percentage of ambulatory children defecated in a latrine. While 78.6% of study children came from 106 households with a latrine, less than a quarter (22.8%) reported using them for disposal of child feces. Most child feces were deposited with other household waste, both for pre-ambulatory (67.5%) and ambulatory (58.1%) children. After restricting the analysis to households owning a latrine, the use of a nappy or potty was associated with safe disposal of feces (OR 6.72, 95%CI 1.02–44.38) though due to small sample size the regression could not adjust for confounders.

Conclusions – In the area surveyed, the Total Sanitation Campaign has not led to high levels of safe disposal of child feces. Further research is needed to identify the actual scope of this potential gap in programming, the health risk presented and interventions to minimize any adverse effect.