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Amplifying sanitation and hygiene practitioner voices - get involved!

Dear friends and colleagues,

What is the reality of accessing sanitation and hygiene in tough physical environments?

We are looking for local practitioners to share their stories through a series of blogs or short recordings.

Our first theme is ‘tough physical environments’. We are interested in experiences and learning beyond technology focussed interventions, involving people in areas with difficult terrains, facing environmental hazards, or are located very remotely. For more information, read our Challenging Contexts Learning Brief.

We want to amplify the voices and perspectives of practitioners workingwithin countries at local and regional level through short written or video outputs which we will work on with you.

Practitioners could be:

Tags: 
WASH practitioners
local WASH stories
Local WASH perspectives
Local sanitation stories
Local sanitation perspectives
tough physical environments sanitation

SDG 6 in 2021: K-shaped development?

The Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) of UNICEF and WHO has released the latest SDG 6 progress report on 1 July. This blog by Gian Melloni unpacks what it says and why it matters, with a focus on sanitation.

The scale of the data JMP gathered, analysed and the trends they monitored for this report is huge: the 7.8 billion humans who populate the Earth. Beyond an obvious feeling of awe, what comes to mind is the well-known joke of the statistician who lies with their head in the oven and their feet in the freezer, and says “On average, I feel comfortable!”. In other words, data and trends at this scale need to be unpacked and interpreted, as big, aggregated figures can hide as much information as they reveal.

Rejuvenate dialogue: Respond and reflect on child and youth rights

A rough black and white sketch of three people with speech bubbles above their heads

Lead by a team at IDS and UHI, the goal of the Rejuvenate project is to re-energise the field of child and youth rights in social justice processes through a growing networks of child rights actors and to further consolidate, evidence and develop the REJUVENATE principles.

Upon publishing the working paper Learning from a Living archive: Rejuvenating Child and Youth Rights and Participation in December 2020, the Rejuvenate team issued a call to action to academics, practitioners, decision makers, advocates, and programme implementers involved in working with children and young people to enter into critical dialogue with our work ‘as the start of an inclusive process of contributing to and building up international dialogue about children’s and youth participation and creating regional networks to share learning on concepts, rights, and goals’.

Register for webinar: Rural sanitation and climate change

Join the Sanitation Learning Hub for a webinar on climate change and rural sanitation – putting ideas into practice.

Wednesday 14th July - 09:30 -11:00 UK Time

Climate change is an emerging concern in the rural sanitation and hygiene sector, where impacts disproportionately affect already disadvantaged and marginalised groups. There is a real risk that progress made in improving rural sanitation access and coverage will slow, or even reverse.

Following the publication of the most recent edition of the Frontiers of Sanitation, the Sanitation Learning Hub and the Institute for Sustainable Futures are organising a webinar to present key aspects of this research on climate change and rural sanitation.

Empowering pastoralist women in Afar region, Ethiopia: the value of PhotoVoice in Covid-sensitive research

This blog is written by Christine Fostvedt-Mills and originally appeared on the Sanitation Learning Hub website. 

There’s much that can be said about the intersection of poverty, gender and the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) and nutrition outcomes of pastoralist women in Afar region, North Ethiopia. Here, women bear the burden of responsibility for nutrition and WASH provision but suffer disproportionately from the effects of poor WASH coverage. Lack of access to nearby reliable water sources means they spend large amounts of time fetching water and lack of adequate sanitation leaves them vulnerable to disease and physical insecurity when they are forced to defecate in the open. However, despite the implications on their health and wellbeing, it can be difficult for women’s voices to be heard when it comes to improving development outcomes for their communities.

Living archive aims to rejuvenate child and youth rights and participation

“I’m only a child and I don’t have all the solutions, but I want you to realise, neither do you.”
Severn Cullis-Suzuki, 12 years old, Rio Earth Summit, 1992

“You come to us young people for hope. How dare you. You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words… all you can talk about is money and eternal fairy tales of economic growth. How dare you.”

Greta Thunberg, 16 years old, UN Climate Action Summit, 2019

Celebrating the Sanitation Learning Hub’s new lease of life

For over ten years, IDS’s Sanitation Learning Hub (previously known as the CLTS Knowledge Hub) has been supporting learning and sharing within the international sanitation and hygiene sector, using innovative participatory approaches. The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) has recently awarded the Sanitation Learning Hub further funding for a four-year programme (2019-2023) so that the Hub can continue to support and strengthen the sector in tackling the complex challenges it faces in delivering universal safely managed sanitation by 2030.

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