Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH)

SIWI – Leading expert in water governance
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Why Water
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Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH)

Water and Peace

When properly managed, water can be a peacemaking platform for long lasting cooperation

Water cooperation

Water is a growing concern in many parts of the world. Countries can improve their water resilience through transboundary water cooperation over shared waters.

Indigenous peoples are the custodians of many of the world’s most fragile and important ecosystems. They also possess invaluable knowledge about sustainability and resilience, so they have a vital role in protecting our environment.

Water and the 2030 Agenda

In 2015, the global community launched the 2030 Agenda, with 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that should be reached by 2030. Some progress has been made, but for most of the goals, the world is not on track to meet the deadline. Water can help us do better.

Water in landscapes

A growing number of people, societies and companies are discovering the power of resilient landscapes. It is still possible to shift to more sustainable practices that recharge water, restore soil health, sequester carbon, and strengthen biodiversity – but we need to make the transformation now.

Agriculture and water

How to increase the productivity of agriculture around the world through better water management.

Groundwater

Groundwater is the regulator of the entire freshwater cycle, but its invisibility makes it difficult to manage and protect.

Rivers

While we all depend heavily on rivers for our survival, many rivers are under constant threat from unsustainable human activities

Water scarcity

Insufficient supply and inadequate infrastructure leaves millions of people in the world without water.

Source-to-Sea

The source-to-sea approach focuses on the strong connection between what happens on land, along waterways, and in the sea.

Water and climate

The climate crisis is essentially a water crisis. When we treat it as such, we get new tools to mitigate climate change and adapt to consequences that are unavoidable.

Water governance

Many of the most pressing challenges in the world are about water: too little, too much or too inferior. Such challenges can only be effectively addressed through adequate governance of available water resources.

The impact of COVID-19

The global COVID-19 pandemic has pushed millions of people back into poverty and exposed unacceptable gaps between the rich and the poor. One in three people are still not able to wash their hands with soap and water at home.

More than two billion people in the world lack safely managed drinking water and twice as many lack safely managed sanitation, making WASH one of the most urgent development challenges.

PERSPECTIVES

Youth and water

More and more young people offer important contributions to solving the growing water challenges they are inheriting.

Human rights and water

Having access to water and sanitation has been recognized as a human right since 2010. But water is also essential to ensuring the fulfilment of many other rights.

Gender and water

To improve water governance, we need to take a close look at gender roles.

To drink unsafe water is to take a serious health risk. But for many people in the world, this is a risk they simply cannot avoid as they lack adequate water and sanitation services.

There is only one way to put it: access to water and sanitation is one of the globe’s most urgent development issues, perhaps the most fundamental. For millions of people around the world, it is a matter of survival.

A lack of adequate drinking water and sanitation services threatens public health, livelihoods, education, and economic and social development on a monumental scale. It is a major obstacle to both breaking the vicious circle of poverty, and also to creating sustainable societies for the future.

It is, therefore, critical that we work to make sure that every person has access to safe drinking water and a toilet as stated in Sustainable Development Goal 6. This is increasingly important in the face of growing water scarcity around the world. And while this may sound straightforward, the reality is that achieving universal access to water and sanitation is a gigantic and complex challenge.

According to UNICEF figures, more than two billion people in the world lack safely managed drinking water, and twice as many lack safely managed sanitation. Over 600 million people practice open defecation. And two in five healthcare facilities worldwide have no soap and water or access to hand sanitizer.

It is critical that we work to make sure that every person has access to safe drinking water and a toilet ...

Way forward

Recently, some progress has been made, but the speed at which positive change is happening is far from adequate. The drinking of unsafe water remains a major concern.

If untreated excreta contaminate groundwater and surface water used for drinking, irrigation, bathing, and household purposes due to lack of sanitation, the risks to health increase exponentially and illnesses such as diarrhoea can run rampant. The global COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the urgency of this matter, as hand washing is one of the most effective proven methods to prevent COVID-19 and other illnesses.

Positive change depends on well-functioning water management and the choices made by governing actors. This stretches far beyond infrastructure investment and must also include institutional capacity, making sure that relevant knowledge, transparency, and accountability guides the work. This is needed to avoid under-utilized, poorly managed, or unsustainable infrastructure solutions.

Fighting corruption

One of the urgent challenges in relation to water resources and services is corruption. Research from Transparency International and others show that the water and sanitation sector is particularly vulnerable to corruption as it often involves large, complex infrastructural projects in a sector with a small number of actors. This makes it difficult to monitor effectively, particularly in developing countries. Corruption limits the scope for improving poor people’s livelihoods and overall health, therefore working against it must be a priority.