Resources

SDG 6.2 calls for sustainable sanitation for all before 2030. Yet over 2 billion people still lack access to basic sanitation facilities. Ensuring good sanitation and hygiene practices for everybody means ending open defecation, tackling existing challenges with access and use, and ensuring all sanitation facilities are safely managed.

Climate change is an added complexity in an already challenging landscape – it exacerbates these challenges and has cascading effects on health and livelihoods. Climate change impacts disproportionately affect already disadvantaged and marginalised groups, jeopardising efforts to Leave No One Behind in the drive for sanitation and hygiene for all. There is a real risk that progress made in improving rural sanitation access and coverage will slow, or even reverse.

The global sanitation sector has taken initial steps to incorporate responses to climate change into rural sanitation programming and services. However, much of the discussion has focused on technological improvements.

There is limited actionable guidance on how the rural sanitation and hygiene sector can make systemic changes through planning and implementing project delivery, enabling demand, changing behaviour, addressing social norms, monitoring and evaluation, and more at the local level. Furthermore, the voices of vulnerable people, households, and communities who are at the forefront of experiencing climate change impacts on sanitation are largely absent in existing discussions.

This publication aims to address these gaps in rural sanitation and hygiene thinking through:

• unpacking the reasons behind the limited progress towards addressing climate change in the sanitation and hygiene sector;
• exploring climate impacts on rural sanitation and hygiene practices;
• placing people, households, and communities at the centre of programming using participatory methods for learning; and
• providing actionable ideas to integrate climate thinking and learning into rural sanitation and hygiene programming at the household and community level.

Rural sanitation practitioners already consider many types of risk in the design and implementation of programmes. This publication supports rural practitioners in civil society and government to add a climate lens to existing programmes. It provides the sector with a menu of options and ideas from a climate change perspective. It is not a prescriptive list or a ‘one size fits all’ approach.

Practitioners can draw on various ideas and parts of this guidance and modify them to suit specific programmatic and regional contexts. The quotes included are from interviews with sanitation and hygiene practitioners. They describe their experience with programming in contexts increasingly challenged by climate related concerns.

The Sanitation Learning Hub's Frontiers of Sanitation series provides practical, evidence-based guidance and recommendations on essential emerging issues and approaches to programming and learning.

The sanitation and hygiene (S&H) situation in most of West Africa is considered to be a cause for concern, despite the efforts and the large campaign towards Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6.2.

This rapid desk-based study focused on local governments, given their increasing importance in ensuring improved access to Sanitation & Hygiene (S&H) in West Africa, and across the world.

It was conducted to identify local governments that could be considered champions in the West African region and that demonstrated strong leadership in S&H; to understand why they have prioritised S&H, the support they received, the stakeholders, the management of inequalities, and the gaps in sub-national governments’ efforts regarding S&H prioritisation.

This is part of the Sanitation Learning Hub’s Learning Brief series.

This publication is also available in French.

This working paper reflects the findings of the first phase of the REJUVENATE project, which set out to understand and map approaches to integrating children, youth, and community participation in child rights initiatives.

In this paper, we:

• present a user-friendly summary of the existing tradition of substantive children’s participation in social change work;
• share case studies across various sectors and regions of the world;
• highlight ongoing challenges and evidence gaps;
• showcase expert opinions on the inclusion of child rights and, in particular, child/youth-led approaches in project-based work.

Grounded in an understanding of child rights as ‘living rights’, we propose building on the 3Ps of the UNCRC (protection, provision and participation) towards the 3Ss – space, support and system change.

We offer a set of field principles (REJUVENATE) to guide substantively participatory work with children and young people, underpinned by our Ndoro Ndoro model, which refers to intergenerational, community-driven approaches that put children and youth at the centre, while being accountable to them.

We recognise that this paper is far from exhaustive, and we intend it to be a springboard for further work that substantively recognises the importance of children’s participation in work to further child rights, and to enrich and rejuvenate the societies of which children are a part.

Explore the Living Archive.

Over the past few years, the Sanitation Learning Hub, in collaboration with the Government of India, Praxis, WSSCC and WaterAid India, have been developing Rapid Action Learning approaches. Multiple approaches have been trialled, with flexible formats, but the essential criteria is that learning is timely, relevant and actionable.

These learning approaches are the focus of the latest edition of the Frontiers of Sanitation series. This Frontiers explains the advantages and disadvantages of the approaches trialled and sets out a challenge to those working in the water, sanitation and hygiene sector to:

1. Reflect on what, for you, constitutes rigour.
2. Adopt and adapt approaches to fit your context and needs.
3. Develop your own approaches.
4. Record your experiences and lessons learnt.
5. Take the time to share your experiences with us. (Email the Hub on SLH@ids.ac.uk)

To commemorate and reflect on the publication, the Hub sat down with colleagues and partners WaterAid India and WSSCC to discuss lessons learned and the future of Rapid Action Learning. You can watch these five short videos in the playlist below.

This Sanitation Learning Hub Learning Paper explores the potential of an innovative participatory visual method known as PhotoVoice to help to achieve universal access to water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) by 2030. The paper outlines what PhotoVoice is, and shares learning relating to its use in the WASH sector around the world for research, programming and advocacy.

It draws on lessons learned from these experiences to show how PhotoVoice can be used for learning in WASH, how it can be used with other methodologies to explore topics which are neglected or taboo, and the benefits and drawbacks of PhotoVoice to consider. It includes practical recommendations for using PhotoVoice in WASH and the ethical considerations to make when it is used. The paper reflects on how PhotoVoice is important for exploring new frontiers in WASH, and can help us gain a deeper understanding into how people experience, interpret and respond to their realities.

Recent debates on ensuring equity and inclusion in sanitation and hygiene provision in the Global South have begun to explore the needs of excluded groups of individuals. Yet, the sanitation and hygiene needs of perimenopausal (PM) women, who are making the transition to menopause, are neglected.

This study explores this new field of research and aims to provide recommendations to meet the sanitation and hygiene needs of PM women. Opening the doors to these needs warrants the use of adaptive, participative, feminist methodologies, placing PM women at the centre of the study to enable them to share their experiences. This research uses a six-stage case study methodology: a literature review, a phenomenological review, research design, case study selection, data collection, and data analysis.

This research identified several sanitation and hygiene needs as crucial to PM women’s health. This research concludes that the hidden sanitation and hygiene needs of PM women require participatory techniques to reveal them. Relationships with certain people allow PM women to discuss and meet the sanitation and hygiene needs to a degree. PM symptoms vary in nature, between women and day to day. This research demonstrates that the sanitation and hygiene sector needs to become more attentive to bathing and laundry issues overall, learning from the needs of PM women.

There is widespread recognition that slippage of open defecation free (ODF) status is a challenge to sustainability across many programmes and contexts. Much has been written about how Community-led Total Sanitation (CLTS) and other sanitation programmes can be set up for sustainability in order to prevent slippage from happening but there is little documented evidence on how slippage can be reversed.

This edition of the Sanitation Learning Hub Frontiers of Sanitation examines what can be done if slippage has already happened. This resource has two parts – the first looks at how slippage is defined, presents a framework for identifying slippage patterns, and revisits the factors known to contribute to slippage. The second section provides six case examples of field experience of slippage and the actions taken to reverse it. It is hoped that this review lays the groundwork for more systematic learning and sharing on slippage to inform current and future programming and practice.

Translations are available in French, Portuguese and Khmer via the Sanitation Learning Hub website.