Water and Sanitation features
“Water and sanitation improvement good for economic development”
23 Nov 11
“In ten places in South Africa we could hear people talk, a group of women who told how they fought for sanitation here and groups that were starting to make money out of looking after sanitation. The local stories we produced were used by Mvula Trust to push for a greater focus on the message that the most important result from water and sanitation improvement is poverty reduction and economic development”. Dick de Jong looks back at the revolution in approaches and technologies in communication he has seen in his 30-year career with IRC in an interview with Peter McIntyre in The Hague on 13 October 2011.
Editorial: My last Source Bulletin
22 Nov 11
This Source Bulletin 66 is going to be the last Source Bulletin I produce and share with the water, sanitation and hygiene world. After nearly 30 years of writing the IRC newsletters and advocacy and communication work for IRC and partners I am retiring at 65 on 1 January 2012. I want to thank all our readers for their letters, announcements, comments, contributions or just reading the Source, which has been published in this format since September 1998.
Select your top 3 Source Bulletin features to be revisited in 2012
22 Nov 11
Looking back at my Source Bulletin work since 1998 and especially articles published since 2005, I began to wonder what happened AFTER some of the stories were written. Did the good practice last – were some of the problems overcome? What if we could get a local journalist to revisit the story and report in 2012 what happened since the date of publishing? Choose the ones you want to be revisited and send your top 3 selection to us by by email.
Gujarat: Water important survival and campaigning issue for women in Bhal community
02 Aug 11
Four young women fresh out of college ventured into this area to try and understand what options the communities might have for development and hope. Experience soon revealed that the key survival issue was drinking water, and that the burden of survival fell primarily on women, suppressed by a particularly harsh patriarchal society. Ashoke Chatterjee in his book Rising/Utthan describes Utthan’s journey into Bhal, one of the most difficult environments in Gujarat
Uganda: Local dialogue helped improved WASH operations in three West Nile districts
02 Aug 11
A good governance and accountability project has served as a catalyst for decentralisation in three West Nile districts in Uganda, empowering grass root communities to demand water and sanitation services and actively participate in affairs that affect them. This is the main conclusion of an external evaluation by a local consultant on the EU funded Improved WASH Governance in West Nile through Local Dialogue project.
Uganda: Why the sub-county is critical for WASH sector coordination
02 Aug 11
The Uganda WASH sector is awash with government and non-government actors at national, district, sub-county and even parish level. However, the variation in mandates, agenda, and resources often lead to duplication and ineffectiveness in terms of service delivery, as well as lack of alignment with government policies and guidelines. This lack of coordination at national and district level affects the sustainability of rural water services.
WASH in schools: debates trigger new call to action
02 Aug 11
Increase national and international investments in WASH in Schools and engage those who set policies are two of the key messages emerging from recent debates organised by IRC, UNICEF and WASH in Schools partners in Europe in April and May 2011.
First consultation on developing post-2015 monitoring indicators, Berlin: Refocusing the monitoring approach
02 Aug 11
Water supply in low-income areas needs to shift the focus from building new hardware, to providing sustainable services. To support this shift, monitoring practices will also have to move from tracking coverage (the number of systems built and users who have access) to tracking services delivered at an agreed level of quality over time.
Life-cycle cost approach, a useful tool for sustainability - but who will foot the bill?
02 Aug 11
The man who has been responsible for meeting the technical challenges of rural water supply in Ghana has backed the life-cycle costs approach (LCCA) as a key element in the search for sustainable services, but has questioned how all the costs will be met.
Burkina Faso: Transporting and storing water: sources for contamination?
02 Aug 11
The International Institute for Water and Environmental Engineering (2iE) at UNICEF’s request conducted a study in Burkina Faso on analysing microbiology and physic-chemical quality of the water along its supply chain (welling, transport, storage).This was coupled with a study on behavioural practices of hygiene linked to supply of water.
