WASH (Water, Sanitation & Hygiene) in Cooperation

As part of the academic program of the course, we have been given the opportunity to choose an elective subject for a two weeks course. My election has been a subject named Water & Cooperation, which was taught completely in english. In this post i want to share my experience and thoughts related with this subject.

That subject has been an opportunity to discover the important role that the WASH technologies play in our society. From the glass of transparent water that we drink with our meal, to the management of dirty water generated in our house, everything is related with the WASH techniques. But not only infrastructure is important to make a good manage of the resource, also population behaviour and education is relevant for a Project success.

The availability of water and a proper sanitation system is a key factor on which depends the development of many regions all over the world:

Water Supply

Everybody understands that having available enough quantity of water with a sufficient quality is basic for human development and economic activity.

In the following figure you can see the regions in the world that suffer from a lack of availability of the resource.

Improved water source, rural (% of rural population with access)

Data from World Bank

For many years, providing the necessary facilities for water supply has been a priority for NGO´s and international agencies.

According to the figure, and taking into account that the eight objectives of the Millennium Development Goals that are related to the Water Supply are being accomplished; it is expected that this issue is likely to stop being a problem for human kind in the following decades.

Sanitation

The sanitation is known as the poor brother of the WASH techniques. For a long time this part of the subject has been disregarded in favour of the water supply projects.

However, since the appearance of important studies regarding the critical importance of sanitation on the fight against deadly illnesses like diarrhoea, the cooperation projects have been giving to that subject more and more importance.

Improved sanitation facilities (% of population with access)

Data from World Bank

The efforts in this area should be strengthened, if we want the developing countries to be able to become self-sufficient. Recent studies estimate that 1100 millions of people still doesn´t have access to improved sanitation facilities, specially in Eastern Asia: India, Indonesia, China…

Many services that we take for granted in our developed countries are luxury in some areas (rural areas and slums) of undeveloped countries. For instance, the availability of improved sanitation systems, such as latrines or water & soap for hand-washing is not common in many areas. The sad part of this scarcity of public health services, is that the spread of diseases is so easy, that this factor contributes to avoid the development of these areas.

As a conclusion

I find that human development must be a key goal of this century in order to make the planet more equal and sustainable. Otherwise, other main objectives such as the struggle against Climate Change or the Resource Availability in the world might be difficult to accomplish.

In addition, i believe that some lessons learnt in water cooperation might be applied to our developed world in order to make it more sustainable. For instance, grey and black water segregation, and its subsequent use.


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