Resources

This Learning Brief presents work undertaken by WaterAid Bangladesh and Rupantar in collaboration with the Sanitation Learning Hub (SLH), at the Institute of Development Studies, and the University of Technology Sydney – Institute for Sustainable Futures (UTS-ISF).

A sanitation-focused climate lens was added to existing ward vulnerability assessment tools due to the increasing WASH-related climate impacts in the study site. The aim was to understand climate induced impacts on WASH and feed this into programmatic guidance through the preparation of locally-led comprehensive ward development plans.

This Learning Brief is intended to provide inspiration to practitioners and WASH experts on how to adapt existing vulnerability assessment tools to integrate climate considerations. This study engaged several stakeholders including climate vulnerable populations, development practitioners, researchers, and local government across Krishnanagar Union under Sathkhira subdistrict, to create evidence-based approaches to address climate induced WASH vulnerabilities in coastal Southwest Bangladesh.

This research sought to answer the following questions:

• What is the current status of WASH facilities in nine wards across in rural southwest Bangladesh?
• How are climatic conditions impacting water, sanitation and hygiene practices?
• What actions can be undertaken by various stakeholders to address climate induced WASH problems?

Millions of people around the world do not have access to adequate sanitation facilities, undermining progress towards Sustainable Development Goal 6.2 that calls for adequate and equitable sanitation for all.

Efforts to improve sanitation outcomes have been rapidly accelerated in the past decade alongside an expansion of different financial incentives or subsidies to promote access to services and motivate sanitation behaviour. In parallel, social protection has become part and parcel of development policy, with many low- and middle-income countries now offering some form of cash transfers to those most vulnerable. Comprehensive interventions that couple financial transfers with complementary support such as behaviour change communication, training, or coaching have also grown increasingly popular.

Despite similarities between water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) subsidy schemes and social protection interventions, these policy areas have largely developed in silos and limited cross-sectoral learning has taken place. This paper begins to fill this knowledge gap by assessing the potential for comprehensive social protection in addressing sanitation outcomes and drawing out policy implications for the social protection and WASH communities. It does so by focusing on a social protection programme in the context of extreme poverty in rural Haiti.

This paper explores access to water, sanitation, and health in pastoral communities in northern Tanzania.

It argues that the concept of gender, used on its own, is not enough to understand the complexities of sanitation, hygiene, water, and health. It explores pastoralists’ views and perspectives on what is ‘clean’, ‘safe’, and ‘healthy’, and their need to access water and create sanitary arrangements that work for them, given the absence of state provision of modern water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) infrastructure.

Although Tanzania is committed to enhancing its citizens’ access to WASH services, pastoral sanitation and hygiene tend to be overlooked and little attention is paid to complex ways in which access to ‘clean’ water and ‘adequate sanitation’ is structured in these communities. This paper offers an intersectional analysis of water and sanitation needs, showing how structural discrimination in the form of a lack of appropriate infrastructure, a range of sociocultural norms and values, and individual stratifiers interact to influence the sanitation and health needs of pastoralist men, women, boys, and girls.

Government leadership at both the national and sub-national levels is an essential step towards ensuring safely managed sanitation services for all. Though the importance of sub-national government leadership for water, sanitation and hygiene is widely acknowledged, to date much of the focus has been on the delivery of water services.

This article sets out to start to address this imbalance by focusing on practical ways to galvanise and foster sub-national government leadership for sanitation programming. By focusing on the experiences across three sub-national areas in East Africa (in Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya) where positive changes in the prioritisation of sanitation by local governments have been witnessed, we (a group of researchers, local government representatives and development partner staff) cross-examine and identify lessons learnt.

The results presented in this paper and subsequent discussion provide practical recommendations for those wishing to trigger a change in political will at the local level and create the foundation to strengthen sanitation governance and the wider system needed to ensure service delivery for all.