The responsibility for sanitation in Asia is fragmented over different agencies, and in most cases the priority given to sanitation is low. Therefore more leadership and political will is needed to make sure that organisational structures function, that plans with good intentions become a reality on the ground and that resources go to the right places. While leadership for sanitation is needed at all levels, it’s most urgent at sub national level, in districts and provinces, because it’s there where the actions take place.

This is the outcome of an email discussion [1] of the WASH Asia Dgroup platform held from 9 August to 9 September 2011. The discussion was moderated by the SNV Asia knowledge network and IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre, and involved 120 WASH practitioners from 5 different countries in Asia.

After the Dgroup discussion, a regional workshop [2] was organised around the same topic in Surkhet, Nepal, from, 13 to 17 September 2011, followed two days later by a discussion meeting [3]  co-organised by  the Ministry of Physical Planning and Works (MPPW) of Nepal.

Table on Leadership Roles from the Asia Workshop report

The Dgroup discussion is the third on rural sanitation and hygiene. The first discussed “Performance Monitoring of Sanitation and Hygiene Behaviour Change” [4] and the second was about “Rural Sanitation Supply Chains and Finance” [5]. All topics are learning components of the Sustainable Sanitation and Hygiene for All (SSH4A) programme in Nepal, Bhutan, Laos, Viet Nam and Cambodia. This programme is funded by the bilateral aid agencies of Australia (AusAID), the United Kingdom (DFID) and The Netherlands (DGIS) and private donors. SNV Netherlands Development Organisation, IRC and local partners in the five countries are implementing the SSH4A programme, which is running from 2008 to 2015.

[1]  Governance for rural sanitation and hygiene : overall summary of Dgroup discussion : 9th of August- 9th of September 2011. Read full summary

[2] Asia Workshop Governance for Rural Sanitation and Hygiene : Surkhet, Nepal,  September 13 – 17, 2011 : workshop report. Read full report

[3] Main points of the discussion programme ‘Sustainable Sanitation and Hygiene for All’. Read full report

[4] Summary of the D-group discussion on performance monitoring. Read full summary

[5] Summary of the Dgroup discussion “Rural Sanitation Supply Chains and Finance”. Read the full summary

To find out more about the Sustainable Sanitation and Hygiene for All (SSH4A) programme go to: www.irc.nl/ssh4a

Related news: Asia: Accelerated and sustainable progress in sanitation and hygiene is within our reach, E-Source, 05 Oct 2011

Photo: WaterAid/ Abir Abdullah & ASM Shafiqur Rahman

SDC and WaterAid signed a grant agreement on 30 November 2011 for a 316 million Taka (US$ 3.84 million) three year rural WASH programme. SDC will provide 265.5 million Taka (US$ 3.23 million), and WaterAid the rest. If successful, SDC will extend support for another 3 years.

Most of the funding will go the ‘Promotion of water supply, sanitation and hygiene in hard -to-reach areas of rural Bangladesh’ project, which aims to provide safe drinking water to 500,000 rural people, latrines to 1.3 million and hygiene education to another 1 million people. WaterAid’s inclusion and climate change programmes will also benefit.

The second WaterAid initiative to receive support is the “Promoting Environmental Health for the Urban Poor (PEHUP)” project, which will be implemented in 3 major cities (Dhaka, Chittagong and Khulna) over a period of five years. Sida signed a cooperation agreement on 20 November 2011 to support this project with a 41 million Krona (US$ 6 million) grant, while WaterAid will provide 20% in match funding.

The project will provide WASH services to 340,000 urban poor people and mobile and public toilets for 1.6 million users.

Related news:

• Bangladesh: BRAC video shows importance of school sanitation for girls, WASH news Asia & Pacific, 08 Sep 2011
• Bangladesh: govt sanitation subsidy scheme ineffective, experts say, WASH news Asia & Pacific, 17 Aug 2011

Related web sites:

• WaterAid – Bangladesh
• SDC – Bangladesh
• Sida – Bangladesh

Source: WaterAid, 30 Nov 2011; WaterAid, 20 Nov 2011

Lake House Chairman Bandula Padmakumara presenting the Randiya tabloid to Water Supply and Drainage Deputy Minister Nirupama Rajapaksa. Editorial Director Seelaratna Senarath is also in the picture. Photo: Dinamina

The Ministry of Water Supply and Drainage has launched the Randiya tabloid paper to raise public awareness on water conservation. Randiya will be published every third Wednesday as an insert in the Dinamina newspaper published by Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Limited (ANCL), also known as Lake House.

Related web site: Sri Lanka – Ministry of Water Supply and Drainage

Source: Priyanka Kurugala, Daily News, 24 Nov 2011

Garbage piled up on a flooded street in Bangkok, Thailand. Photo: Getty Images / WSJ

Industrial parks in Bangkok are being threatened after residents in Bangkok’s northeast demolish government-built levies to release the stagnant, garbage-ridden water that was building up in their neighbourhoods, writes the Wall Street Journal.

Flooded roads are preventing garbage collectors getting to many areas—raising fears over the risk of disease and over the blockage of drains, which is impeding the flow of water into the sea. Bangkok produces about 8,700 tons of rubbish a day—roughly a quarter of Thailand’s total. Added to that figure is the additional trash flowing into the city from northern provinces.

Now trash-strewn water is encircling the Bang Chan and Lat Krabang industrial estates where multinationals like Unilever, Nestle and Honda are operating. Several key industrial parks are already flooded, severely disrupting the supply of auto parts and computer components.

City governor, Sukhumbhand Paribatra, has ordered the municipal refuse collectors to work around the clock in their trucks and boats in an attempt to to prevent a bigger disaster, while teams of street sweepers scour the city to keep debris from clogging vital drains.

Concerns about disease spreading are also growing, CNN reports.

The country’s Ministry of Public Heath has distributed 20,700 test kits for leptospirosis, a severe bacterial infection that can affect areas where water has been stagnant for more than three weeks.

MOPH reported that up until November 7, more than 1.3 million people had become sick in provinces affected by the floods, of which athlete’s foot accounted for almost 70% of cases.

A group of young Thai animators has created a cartoon series called RooSuFlood to simplify flood information and help people prepare.

Episode four of the RooSuFlood series includes some water and sanitation-related health messages.

Source: James Hookway, Wall Street Journal, 08 Nov 2011 ; CNN,
09 Nov 2011 ; Daniel Schearf, VOA, 08 Nov 2011

The Pacific island nation of Tuvalu (pop. 10,544) has declared a state of emergency due to severe water shortages on 28 September 2011 after existing desalination plants broke, exacerbating an already dire situation. The Australian, New Zealand and U.S. Defence forces – together with the Red Cross – have set up emergency desalination plants on two of the country’s nine islands.

A Red Cross situation report said the former British colony relied mostly on rainwater, which had been scarce this year because of a La Nina weather pattern across the Pacific.

The government of Tuvalu said the water crisis was likely to last until at least January 2012, when there’s more chance of heavy rain.

For the latest updates on the Tuvalu water crisis visit ReliefWeb

Source: AFP / New Age, 03 Oct 2011 ; ABC / ReliefWeb, 17 Oct 2011 ; Drought – Information Bulletin n° 2, IFRC / ReliefWeb, 14 Oct 2011 ; ABC / ReliefWeb, 14 Oct 2011

Exposure to arsenic-contaminated groundwater has been linked to almost one in every five deaths in Bangladesh, and some 100,000 deep wells have been constructed to pump deeper, cleaner water. Recent modelling studies have suggested that these cleaner water sources are also being contaminated — from shallower water seeping down to replenish deeper wells.

But a study published in Nature Geoscience [doi: 10.1038/ngeo1283] found that natural adsorption of arsenic by sediment — sand in the aquifers — reduces contamination risk in most areas.

The study was conducted as part of the Columbia University Superfund Research Program on the “Health Effects and Geochemistry of Arsenic and Manganese“.

Read more [Syful Islam, SciDev.Net, 10 Oct 2011]

Supply-driven approaches to rural sanitation in Viet Nam, with associated toilet subsidies, have had little success over the last decade. Since 2003, International Development Enterprises (IDE) Vietnam has achieved better results in several pilots with an alternative approach involving rural sanitation marketing. As a result, the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA) has supported IDE in collaboration with the Health Environment Agency of the Ministry of Health (MOH) (HEMA) to implement a rural sanitation marketing pilot project within the National Target Program II (NTP II) program in Quang Tri province since 2010. This report  provides an analysis of the potential as well as the constraints for integrating sanitation marketing into NTP II.

A variety of research methods are used in this study, consisting of a desktop literature review and fieldwork in Viet Nam. The findings from this study reveal that demand for sanitation is existent in study communes in Quang Tri and access to sanitation can be improved through offering appropriate toilets at an affordable cost. The concern is that the strategies of both government agencies and IDE lack an environmental focus due to many institutional and social constraints. In addition, there is evidence that the National Strategy and policy for rural water supply and sanitation (RWSS) are contradicted by the financing mechanism for implementation of the NTP program. To overcome such a contradiction, donor attention is crucial in strengthening accountability of the NTP program implementation and supporting oversight by civil society and local recipients of finance and sanitation service delivery.

Related web sites:

• Viet Nam – Rural Water Supply & Sanitation Partnership (RWSSP)
• IDE Viet Nam
• Danida – Viet Nam – Water and Sanitation

Concern for daughters and for elderly relatives are two factors often mentioned by families as motivating factors, especially as ‘safe’ places to defecate outside disappear.

In Venkatapuram village in the Kammam District of Andhra Pradesh Suresh added a toilet to his home in the 1990s, mostly because of concern about his mother, Rangamma. “The biggest difficulty was that my mother had to go a long distance to find a place. It was really getting very difficult.”

Suresh and his mother outside their home in Venkatapuram with the toilet that he built. Photo: WASHCost/IRC

Data from both the WASHCost project and the (new) Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation show that existing government norms underestimate the real cost of toilets. Subsidies for the poor, which are supposed to cover 90% of toilet costs in reality cover less than 40%. Poor families are either stuck with half-built, unused toilets, or have to take out a considerable loan to finish them. Replacing subsidies by low interest or no interest loans may be a better option as it could stimulate a market in low cost toilets.

Read the full story on the WASHCost web site [Peter McIntyre, WASHCost India/IRC, 16 Sep 2011]

Regional sharing and learning from experiences is an important aspect of the Sustainable Sanitation and Hygiene for All programme being implemented in 17 districts across Nepal, Bhutan, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia, implemented by local government partners and assisted by SNV and IRC since 2008. Last year, this programme was intensified with co-funding from the AusAID Civil Society WASH Fund and recently with support from DFID in Vietnam. The aim is to contribute to giving two million rural people access to improved hygiene and sanitation facilities by the end of 2015.

The multiple-donor programme addresses one of the biggest challenges in rural sanitation: its low priority in local government and in particular in resource allocation. Dialogue among sector stakeholders and joint target setting for district-wide rural sanitation coverage has helped to overcome this to a greater extent, and even to create drive and leadership for sanitation. Also, district sanitation plans have been made and joint monitoring has helped to create a common understanding and buy-in from different stakeholders to prioritize sanitation.Specific attention is given to how to support the most vulnerable groups in society, reviewing current poverty ranking and subsidy practices. Women and socially excluded groups have been supported to put forward their opinions about sanitation at community and district level.

The Mid-western region of Nepal is an example when it comes to leadership and rapid progress in rural sanitation. The Regional Monitoring and Supervision Office, Surkhet (RMSO)/ Department of Water Supply and Sewerage (DWSS) has successfully brought local stakeholders together, promoted leadership for sanitation at all levels (district, Village Development Committee (VDC), community) and ensured district sanitation plans in all 15 districts. The number of villages that are declared open defecation free has increased from five in 2010 to 40 in the past 12 months in Mid-western region. The sanitary quality of toilets increased from 25% to 75% of the households in 21 districts in the mid-western region.”Now I am glad that district and village development committees are taking the lead in the district sanitation programme and there is a joint movement,” says Prem Krishna Shrestha, former Senior Divisional Engineer in Surkhet district in mid-western Nepal. “We were surely going to miss the MDG and national targets of universal sanitation coverage by 2017 if we had taken the same pace as before.”

Read more about the Sustainable Sanitation and Hygiene for All (SSH4A) programme at /www.irc.nl/page/57188

Source: MPPW/SNV/IRC, 19 Sep 2011

[Female students] have expressed that something so simple like as a sanitary latrine can change their entire educational experience.

The video was directed and edited by Sara Liza Baumann of Old Fan Films.