Integration is a strategic aim in WaterAid’s new Global Strategy. Working in the intersection of WASH, the cornerstones of their programmes are health, education, gender and urbanization.
For example, influencing for greater integration of WASH and child health is their current Global Advocacy Priority, called ‘Healthy Start’, where WaterAid continues to increase its engagement with both WASH and health sectors to help demonstrate and ensure WASH access is recognized as a critical component of a strengthened public health system. Further, WaterAid’s WASH in schools programming focuses on three interlinking themes: the enabling environment, quality implementation and sustainable management. Understanding and supporting an enabling environment is essential to effectively develop systems for sustainable and inclusive school WASH.
WaterAid also supports marginalised groups to become aware of their rights to WASH and to help their communities recognise these rights, such as women’s groups, disabled people’s and older people’s organizations. They promote gender-sensitive solutions in water and sanitation infrastructure and behaviour change approaches. Hygiene behaviour change is critical to realizing the positive health outcomes of taps and toilets, and also offers unique opportunities to empower women and girls in WASH programming.
WaterAid also work collaboratively with urban communities, and the most marginalized groups within them, to ensure that water users can demand better services, and hold municipal providers and authorities to account. Authorities have an obligation to ensure everyone has access to sustainable water and sanitation services, and WaterAid supports them to develop contextually appropriate solutions to urban challenges, treating each city or town as a unique case with a unique set of constraints, opportunities and solutions. They work on sector strengthening, building the capacity of the broader WASH sector to create an enabling environment which supports sustainable long term change.
- Organization: WaterAid