WASH
WASH is a sector in development cooperation, or within local governments, that provides water, sanitation, and hygiene services to communities. The main purposes of providing access to WASH services are to achieve public health gains, implement the human right to water and sanitation, reduce the burden of collecting drinking water for women, and improve education and health outcomes at schools and healthcare facilities. Access to WASH services is an important component of water security. Universal, affordable, and sustainable access to WASH is a key issue within international development, and is the focus of the first two targets of Sustainable Development Goal 6. Targets 6.1 and 6.2 aim for equitable and accessible water and sanitation for all. In 2017, it was estimated that 2.3 billion people live without basic sanitation facilities, and 844 million people live without access to safe and clean drinking water. The acronym WASH is used widely by non-governmental organizations and aid agencies in developing countries.
The WASH-attributable burden of disease and injuries has been studied in depth. Typical diseases and conditions associated with a lack of WASH include diarrhea, malnutrition, and stunting, in addition to neglected tropical diseases. There are additional health risks for women, for example, during pregnancy and birth, or in connection with menstrual hygiene management. Chronic diarrhea can have long-term negative effects on children in terms of both physical and cognitive development. Still, collecting precise scientific evidence regarding health outcomes that result from improved access to WASH is difficult due to a range of complicating factors. Scholars suggest a need for longer-term studies of technological efficiency, greater analysis of sanitation interventions, and studies of the combined effects of multiple interventions to better analyze WASH health outcomes.
Access to WASH is required not only at the household level but also in non-household settings like schools, healthcare facilities, workplaces, prisons, temporary use settings and for dislocated populations. In schools, group handwashing facilities can improve hygiene. Lack of WASH facilities at schools often causes female students to not attend school, thus reducing their educational achievements.
It is difficult to provide safely managed WASH services in urban slums. WASH systems can also fail quite soon after installation. Further challenges include polluted water sources and the impacts of climate change on water security. Planning approaches for more reliable and equitable access to WASH include, for example, national WASH plans and monitoring, women's empowerment, and improving the climate resilience of WASH services. Adaptive capacity in water management systems can help to absorb some of the impacts of climate-related events and increase climate resilience. Stakeholders at various scales, for example, from small urban utilities to national governments, need to have access to reliable information about the regional climate and any expected changes due to climate change.
Components
The WASH concept groups together the various aspects of water supply, including access to drinking water services, sanitation, and hygiene because the impact of deficiencies in each area overlap strongly.Drinking water services
and UNICEF state that a safe drinking water service is one that is located in an accessible location, available when needed, and uncontaminated. Additionally, WHO and UNICEF use the terms improved water source and unimproved water source as a water quality monitoring tool. The term "improved water source" refers to piped water on premises. Examples include a piped household water connection located inside the user's dwelling plot or yard, and other improved drinking water sources such as public taps or standpipes, tube wells or boreholes, protected dug wells, protected springs, and rainwater collection.Access to drinking water is included in Target 6.1 of Sustainable Development Goal 6, which states: "By 2030, achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all." This target's single indicator, Indicator 6.1.1, which states "Proportion of population using safely managed drinking water services." In 2017, 844 million people still lacked even a basic drinking water service. In 2019, it was reported that 435 million people used unimproved sources for their drinking water, and 144 million still used surface water, such as lakes and streams.
Drinking water can be sourced from the following water sources: surface water, groundwater, or rainwater, in each case after collection, treatment, and distribution. Desalinated seawater is another potential source for drinking water.
People without access to safe, reliable, domestic water supplies face lower water security at specific times throughout the year due to cyclical changes in water quantity or quality. For example, where access to water on-premises is not available, drinking water quality at the point of use can be much worse compared to the quality at the point of collection. Correct household practices around hygiene, storage, and treatment are therefore important. There are interactions between weather, water source, and management, and these in turn impact drinking water safety.
Groundwater
Groundwater provides critical freshwater supply, particularly in dry regions where surface water availability is limited. Globally, more than one-third of the water used originates from underground. In the mid-latitude arid and semi-arid regions lacking sufficient surface water supply from rivers and reservoirs, groundwater is critical for sustaining global ecology and meeting societal needs of drinking water and food production. The demand for groundwater is rapidly increasing with population growth, while climate change is imposing additional stress on water resources and raising the probability of severe drought occurrence.The anthropogenic effects on groundwater resources are mainly due to groundwater pumping and the indirect effects of irrigation and land use changes.
Groundwater plays a central role in sustaining water supplies and livelihoods in sub-Saharan Africa. In some cases, groundwater is an additional water source that was not used previously.
Reliance on groundwater is increasing in sub-Saharan Africa as development programs work towards improving water access and strengthening resilience to climate change. Lower-income areas typically install groundwater supplies without water quality treatment infrastructure or services. The assumption that untreated groundwater is typically suitable for drinking due to its relative microbiological safety compared to surface water underpins this practice, largely disregarding chemistry risks. Chemical contaminants occur widely in groundwater sources that are used for drinking but are not regularly monitored. Example priority parameters are fluoride, arsenic, nitrate, or salinity.
Sanitation services
Sanitation systems are grouped into several types. The ladder of sanitation services includes : open defecation, unimproved, limited, basic, safely managed. A distinction is made between sanitation facilities that are shared between two or more households and those that are not shared. The definition of improved sanitation facilities is facilities designed to hygienically separate excreta from human contact.With regard to toilets, improved sanitation includes the following types of toilets: flush toilet, connections to a piped sewer system, septic systems, pour-flush pit latrines, pit latrines with slabs, ventilated improved pit latrines, and composting toilets.
Access to sanitation services is included in Target 6.2 of Sustainable Development Goal 6, which is: "By 2030, achieve access to adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene for all and end open defecation, paying special attention to the needs of women and girls and those in vulnerable situations." This target has one indicator: Indicator 6.2.1 which states "proportion of population using safely managed sanitation services and a hand-washing facility with soap and water".
In 2017, 4.5 billion people did not have toilets at home that could safely manage waste, despite improvements in access to sanitation over the past decades. Approximately 600 million people share a toilet or latrine with other households, and 892 million people practice open defecation.
There are many barriers that make it difficult to achieve sanitation for all. These include social, institutional, technical and environmental challenges. Therefore, the problem of providing access to sanitation services cannot be solved by focusing on technology alone. Instead, it requires an integrated perspective that includes planning, using economic opportunities, and behavior change interventions.
Fecal sludge management and sanitation workers
Sanitation services would not be complete without safe fecal sludge management, which is the storage, collection, transport, treatment, and safe end use or disposal of fecal sludge. Fecal sludge is defined very broadly as what accumulates in onsite sanitation systems and specifically is not transported through a sewer. Sanitation workers are the people needed for cleaning, maintaining, operating, or emptying a sanitation technology at any step of the sanitation chain.Hygiene
Hygiene is a broad concept. "Hygiene refers to conditions and practices that help to maintain health and prevent the spread of diseases." Hygiene can comprise many behaviors, including hand washing, menstrual hygiene and food hygiene. In the context of WASH, hand washing with soap and water is regarded as a top priority in all settings and has been chosen as an indicator for national and global monitoring of hygiene access. "Basic hygiene facilities" are those where people have a hand washing facility with soap and water available on their premises. Hand washing facilities can consist of a sink with tap water, buckets with taps, , and portable basins.In the context of SDG 6, hygiene is included in the indicator for Target 6.2: "Proportion of population using a hand-washing facility with soap and water"
In 2017, the global situation was reported as follows: Only 1 in 4 people in low-income countries had hand washing facilities with soap and water at home; only 14% of people in Sub-Saharan Africa have hand washing facilities. Worldwide, at least 500 million women and girls lack adequate, safe, and private facilities for managing menstrual hygiene.
Approximately 40% of the world's population live without basic hand washing facilities with soap and water at home.