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USAID’s Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Partnerships and Learning for Sustainability (WASHPaLS) is a five year project that supports the agency’s goal of reducing morbidity and mortality in children under five by ensuring USAID programming employs high-impact, evidence-based environmental health and WASH interventions.
In January and February 2018, the first of the WASH Benefits trials findings were published in the Lancet Global Health from Bangladesh and Kenya.
Poor nutrition and exposure to faecal contamination are associated with diarrhoea and growth faltering, both of which have long-term consequences for child health. This trial aimed to assess whether water, sanitation, handwashing, and nutrition interventions reduced diarrhoea or growth faltering.
The USAID Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene Partnerships and Learning for Sustainability (WASHPaLS) project conducted a review of the scientific and grey literature, complemented by dozens of key informant interviews with researchers and field implementers, to synthesize the latest understanding of key pathways of fecal microbe ingestion by IYC and their links to diarrhea, EED, and poor nutrition and development outcomes.
Specifically, the review sought to:
A growing body of evidence shows that there is a strong causal link between exposure to poor sanitation and detrimental health, human capital, and economic outcomes. At the same time a number of recent impact evaluations of specific sanitation interventions show mixed results. waterlines.jpg
This heterogeneity in findings raises the questions of whether and how the demonstrated benefits of improved sanitation can be consistently achieved through regular project implementation.
Faecal contamination of groundwater from pit latrines is widely perceived as a major threat to the safety of drinking water for several billion people in rural and peri-urban areas worldwide.
Faecal contamination of groundwater from pit latrines is widely perceived as a major threat to the safety of drinking water for several billion people in rural and peri-urban areas worldwide.
I have just completed three days at the WEDC 40th International Conference held at Loughborough University in the UK. As always the conference was packed with a wide range of interesting paper presentations, posters, side-events and associated activities. Meeting colleagues new and old from across the globe is always a wonderful part of a WEDC conference and at the same time to become aware of the range of experience and learning that has been going on over the past few years. This year was no exception.
The study by Valerie Bauza and Jeremy S. Guest looked at the relationship between child faeces disposal and child growth in low- and middle-income countries. You can read a more detailed abstract here. It was published in the Journal of Tropical Medicine and International Health is available for purchase from the Wiley Online Library
Open defecation, which is still practiced by about a billion people worldwide, is one of the most compelling examples of how place influences health in developing countries. Efforts by governments and development organizations to address the world's remaining open defecation would be greatly supported by a better understanding of why some people adopt latrines and others do not.
