The human right to water and sanitation has been most commonly approached from the perspective of legal machinery and mechanisms for its implementation. Perhaps an underlying assumption among human rights practitioners is that once action for implementing the right is undertaken, its realization will be achieved. Often ignored are factors and processes at the micro-level where action for ...
New targets for drinking water and sanitation were the prime water-related outcome of the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. They aimed at better health and development. The critical mass needed to implement them must be created, primarily at the local level involving the people, governments and nongovernmental organizations but with responsive participation and large-scale ...
This paper analyses the appropriateness of public versus private models of providing and managing water and sanitation services. Better management practices, along with well-suited institutional arrangements, are needed to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) on water supply and sanitation. There has been Private Sector Involvement (PSI) in the drinking water sector in the four cases ...
Economic evidence on the cost and benefits of sanitation and drinking-water supply supports higher allocation of resources and selection of efficient and affordable interventions. The study aim is to estimate global and regional costs and benefits of sanitation and drinking-water supply interventions to meet the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target in 2015, as well as to attain universal ...
Experienced water operators, donors, financiers and water authorities are challenged to assist the thousands of public water operators that are in urgent need of improving their services. Partnerships between operators present a way to improve and extend basic water and sanitation services to all consumers. A WOP is defined as any form of simple or structured ...
Using household survey data for Guatemala, this paper investigates the role of water and sanitation infrastructure on diarrhea incidence in children. Hierarchical logit models of diarrhea incidence are estimated to account for potential regional heterogeneity of water and sanitation effects. Results indicate that the incidence probability of diarrhea is on average 20% lower in homes connected ...
Matt Damon and Gary White feature in this video by Bloomberg from this year’s meeting in Davos. Matt Damon co-founded H2OAfrica. Gary White founded Water Partners. And they merged to create Water.org. Water.org is a charity backed by a number of major organisations and foundations. Water.org has also set up Waterequity. They act as an investment fund manager offering modest but ...
Reforms in the water supply and sanitation sector in Uganda and Zambia have appeared to favour increasing the scale of operations of the utilities. By elaborating on these cases, this article argues that the trend to centralisation is a consequence of a particular dimension of the New Public Management reform agenda, namely increased commercialisation in the water supply and sanitation sector. ...
The paper looks at alternative scientific research approaches and traditions related to Water Resources Management (WRM) and Water Supply and Sanitation (WSS) services. How can they explain the problem-oriented water governance challenges, and how do they apply to multi- and inter-disciplinary research? It is argued that the bias in favour of a positivistic approach and natural sciences in water ...
This week, SIWI’s Dr. Alejandro Jiménez is in Addis Ababa attending a High Level Panel organized by Sanitation and Water For All (SWA). 1. What is the event? The SWA Ministerial Meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The two-day, high-level meeting, under the aegis of the Sanitation and Water for All partnership, and convened by UNICEF, is hosted by the Government of Ethiopia. 2. ...
Scaling the sanitation ladder decreases exposure to various illnesses including diarrheal disease, soil-transmitted helminths and trachoma. In rural Zambia, community-led total sanitation (CLTS) has been deployed to help Zambians scale the sanitation ladder. Analysis of monthly routine surveillance data of village-level sanitation coverage of 13,688 villages shows that villages moved up the ...
Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infected people have substantially greater need for water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH). Many opportunistic infections cause high morbidity and mortality in people living with HIV (PLHIV) than in immune competent populations. The objective of the study was to assess WASH practices and associated factors among PLHIV. A cross-sectional study design was ...
In most developing countries many people are lacking access to water and sanitation services. Collection and conveyance of wastewater out of urban neighbourhoods is not yet a service provided to all the population and adequate treatment is provided only to a small portion of the collected wastewater, in most cases covering less than 10% of the municipal wastewater generated. In slums and ...
Mortality rates of some diseases are affected by water quality. This research examines the roles of two factors related to water quality, namely the quality of drinking water termed ‘water’ and the quality of sanitation termed ‘sanitation’. Two age-related diseases, cardiovascular disease and diabetes (CDD) and chronic respiratory conditions (CRC) are considered while adjusting for personal ...
Clinically relevant antimicrobial resistant bacteria, genetic resistance elements, and antibiotic residues (so-called AMR) from human and animal waste are abundantly present in environmental samples. This presence could lead to human exposure to AMR. In 2015, the World Health Organization (WHO) developed a Global Action Plan for Antimicrobial Resistance with one of its strategic objectives ...
Pook se Bos informal settlement and the Cape Town Water & Sanitation Services Department are partnering on an urban sanitation project with a Dutch Consortium consisting of Lettinga Associates Foundation (LeAF), Landustrie Sneek and Vitens-Evides International. The aim of the project is to improve the basic sanitation services provided in informal settlements through the implementation of the ...
Access to water and sanitation services in urban India is widespread, but little is known about the quality and level of service, and coverage of the poor households. A key challenge in the sector in India is the lack of adequate and reliable information. Very little is known about the quantity of water made available to people, non-revenue water, quality of water and coverage of poor households. ...
Demand for adequate provision of drinking-water and sanitation facilities to promote public health and economic growth is increasing in the rapidly urbanizing countries of the developing world. With a panel of data on Asia and Africa from 1990 to 2008, associations are estimated between the occurrence of cholera outbreaks, the case rates in given outbreaks, the mortality rates associated with ...
As we celebrate World Water Week (23 – 28 August 2015), we remember that millions of people worldwide still do not have access to clean drinking water. Yoka Brandt, Unicef Deputy Executive Director, writes about the right for every child to have access to clean water. If you were to ask me what I dream about, I’d probably say watching my beloved Netherlands score the winning goal in ...
Drinking-water supply and sanitation services are essential for human health, but their technologies and management systems are potentially vulnerable to climate change. An assessment was made of the resilience of water supply and sanitation systems against forecast climate changes by 2020 and 2030. The results showed very few technologies are resilient to climate change and the sustainability of ...