Jolly Ann Maulit

Blog 1 of 3: Opportunities for market shaping in West and Central Africa

Last November UNICEF’s West and Central Africa Regional Office, Supply Division and WASH Programme Division convened a regional sanitation industry consultation in Abuja, Nigeria. The consultation brought together 100+ representatives from industry, financial institutions, governments and development partners. This series of three blogs is based on the discussions held on market shaping – including the current thinking, how it can increase uptake of improved sanitation facilities amongst the poorest households, and how it is being considered at the country level.

Learnings from our East and Southern Africa workshop

This blog post is on reaching the 'last mile' and moving up the sanitation ladder - learnings that emerged from the East and Southern Africa Sharing and Learning Workshop. At the recent CLTS Knowledge Hub regional sharing and learning workshop held in Arusha 16-20 April, it was encouraging to see that the discourse and programming in the region has matured since the early days of CLTS (and early days of these sharing and learning workshops!).

The potential of WASH in extra household settings:

Lenka Benova presenting on the links between WASH in health centres and maternal health

The session on extra-household settings focused on sanitation and hygiene issues beyond the household, eg schools, markets, health facilities, refugee camps, settings with internally displaced people, prisons, and mass gatherings.

Measuring handwashing behaviour change and use(fulness) of M&E data

Participants listening to a presentation at the IRC symposium

The last official day of the symposium brought forth many interesting things to think about. Some of the key things discussed were various ways of measuring hand washing behaviour and whether the information we collect is actually used.

On the ground realities and inclusion

The second day of the WASH M&E Symposium built off the momentum gained from the day before. Many interesting topics were discussed, including how well information gathered from monitoring truly reflects the reality on the ground and the inclusion of equity in our monitoring efforts in order to reach universal access. Both of these presentations encourage practitioners to truly understand the realities of those on the ground.

Reflections from the first day of the IRC symposium on Monitoring Sustainable WASH Service Delivery

Over 400 people from 58 countries gathered together in Addis Ababa to begin 3 days of discussions on sustainable WASH M&E. The symposium is hosted by IRC (with support from the Government of Ethiopia, AMCOW, and various organizations) and includes WASH practitioners from government, NGOs, international organizations and academics, among other participants. The vision of the symposium in short is to drive towards "strong national sector monitoring systems that allow for planning and sustaining WASH services". There's a strong push towards government-led monitoring systems and continuous monitoring over time, not only of infrastructure but of the various components of WASH service delivery (e.g. the financing, the cost effectiveness, the behaviour changes).

Handwashing: Part and parcel of CLTS?!

Handwashing is a vital part of good sanitation and hygiene and the issue is always raised during triggering. If the community (and the facilitator) understands CLTS and its true meaning of cutting all faecal-oral contamination routes, there is no way handwashing will be left out.

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Community-Led Total Sanitation