Hygiene campaigns like no other, based on water, soap, and love. As part of the second edition of the HBCC (Hygiene and Behaviour Change Coalition), in Ghana and Kenya, WSUP planned and executed activities for a particularly vulnerable group of people: those with some kind of disability. From men and women who cannot see or […]
By Kariuki Mugo, Director of WASH Sector Support The WASH sector (water, sanitation and hygiene) is slow-acting and slow-learning. This fact became clear to me back in February while attending the International Faecal Sludge Management Conference in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. In particular, our workshop,“Bridging the Funding Gap for Sanitation Services in Informal Settlements”, helped me […]
Dear WSUP friends and supporters, we are redesigning our website! We are in the process of building a new website, easier to use and more attractive, and we would love to have your help. In order to better understand where and how you and other readers would like to find content on the new WSUP […]
This year’s theme for World Water Day, Accelerating Change, reminds us all of the urgent need to improve provision of clean water and safe sanitation around the world. At WSUP, we believe that combating waste of water and resources is essential if governments, utilities and communities are to speed up their journey towards water, sanitation […]
WSUP’s 2021-2022 Annual Report has been launched, showing how our organisation’s work in Southern Africa and Asia has advanced even more, with different initiatives in water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) in low-income urban areas. It was a particularly important year for WSUP’s activities promoting good WASH services for women and girls. Another highlight was its […]
Our 2021-2022 Annual Report shows the result of WSUP’s activities, benefitting more than 1 million people in the past year, across Africa and South Asia. In the period, we achieved:
618,418 people with improved water access;
580,730 residents with improved sanitation services;
168,454 people with improved access to good hygiene;
and mobilised more than $12 million in additional investment.
Lord Paul Boateng, WSUP’s chairman, wrote:
“In addition to our work with households and families, we are also investing more and more in providing clean water and decent toilets in schools, helping reduce student absences and improving the educational chances for children, particularly girls.”
Ed Mitchell, who in 2022 assumed the position of WSUP’s CEO, writes:
Download resource“Together with our supportive partners, we can take pride in what we’ve done so far, but we also need to raise our sights and ambitions to reach many more people in desperate need.”
This is the second in a series of articles named “Letter from…”, written by WSUP’s teams in the main countries where we operate (Bangladesh, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Zambia, and Madagascar). Our second Letter comes from Ghana and focuses on the importance of the Ashanti Region for the country. By Frank Romeo Kettey, Country Manager, in […]
Covid-19 infections have significantly declined in many parts of the world, after the spread of the Omicron variant, and that is also true in Africa. With the end of restrictions and with vaccinations levels still low in much of the continent, however, the adoption of good hygiene practices is as important as it has ever […]
Joint article by AMCOW, Speak Up Africa, UNICEF and WSUP. This week’s World Water Forum, taking place in Dakar, Senegal, is a timely reminder of how the world is slipping behind its commitment to achieve universal access to safe sanitation by 2030. Access to basic sanitation and hygiene services is a primary concern globally, with […]
A joint publication by AMCOW, Speak Up Africa, UNICEF and WSUP
On the 10th of June, 2021, the African Council of Ministers on Water (AMCOW) launched the African Sanitation Policy Guidelines (ASPG), a new initiative to help improve national and subnational sanitation and hygiene policy across the continent.
The policy guidelines aim to ease the process of resolving country-level enabling environment bottlenecks that stand in the way of African governments in meeting their national, regional, and global sanitation and hygiene obligations. They provide direction in functional policy drafting, broad stakeholder engagement, monitoring, and generic technical content specific to sanitation and hygiene service provision.
This report explains the background to the creation of the ASPG and presents the importance of these policy guidelines. It then outlines examples from across Africa showing how the six parts to the guidelines can be applied:
Sanitation Systems and Services (South Africa)
Hygiene and Behaviour Change (Rwanda)
Institutional Arrangements (Senegal)
Regulation (Zambia)
Capacity Development (South Africa)
Funding and Financing (Chad)
High-level advocacy is key to the success of the ASPG rollout. Engaging senior policymakers in this process is the winning formula of success. Time and resources will be invested in continuous advocacy meetings and a wide stakeholder engagement to ensure no one is left behind during the policy process.The ASPG provides a wide range of resources that requires investing in the various stakeholders’ capacity building. This process presents an excellent opportunity for documenting both the learning and sharing, as part of knowledge management for policy processes.
Previous experiences across the continent clarify that Africa can achieve the indicators of progress outlined in the guidelines because they have been done before, even if only in a few countries. This time around the focus is on increasing the scale of success to the entire continent.
Africa has rightfully and decisively opted to pursue something that its leaders and populations can deliver. With political will and determination to design the right policies towards a common goal, the African Sanitation Policy Guidelines should generate a high level of confidence and certainty amongst the continent’s authorities, summarised by these encouraging words: it can be done.
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