Opinions and voices for change
Navigate the blogs from our experts, water, sanitation and hygiene sector colleagues and guests. Narrow down your search by using the filters.
Delft Symposium session takes capacity building as its central theme. Read more...
Sagar is an island at the mouth of the river Ganges where it meets the Bay of Bengal. Every year in January, about half a million pilgrims visit the island to worship at the holy Ganges. The hundreds of mobile toilet units standing on the empty festival terrain during the rest of the year are... Read more...
Over the past year, there has been quite a bit of buzz in the WASH sector on the sustainability clause that DGIS seeks to include in its contacts with implementers. The pros and cons of this have been widely debated . A key component of the clauses is to have sustainability checks as a way to... Read more...
The BRAC WASH programme has helped establish 80,000 Village WASH Committees, whose members are so engaged they're even going into politics. Read more...
Anyone who works in the water sector cannot have missed the consultations and debates on the post-2015 goals for water and sanitation. Read more...
This story is fictional. Any resemblance to real situations or persons is pure coincidence. When Alice stepped through the mirroring water surface into waterland, the first creature she came across was a rabbit, wearing a UN-blue jacket, looking frantically at its watch. "It is nearly time. Only... Read more...
A few weeks ago, an interesting email discussion was held on “water point mapping” D-Groupof the Rural Water Supply Network (RWSN). Part of the discussion focused on how much it costs to map or monitor all water systems in a country. Various figures were floating around in the discussion. But when... Read more...
Driven amongst others by the mobile phone applications, more and more statistics are becoming available on the state of water services. These go well beyond the coverage data we were used to in the JMP reports (and which this year gave us some reason to be mildly optimistic). The new stats provide... Read more...
Driven amongst others by the mobile phone applications, more and more statistics are becoming available on the state of water services. These go well beyond the coverage data we were used to in the JMP reports (and which this year gave us some reason to be mildly optimistic). The new stats provide... Read more...
One of the key premises behind community-based management is that users pay for the operation and maintenance costs. On this blog we have reported at various occasions about the non-payment of major repairs. But some of the data presented this recently, show that even payment of minor O&M costs... Read more...
Last week, we had our first Triple-S research seminar, discussing the first findings from the assessments of service provision around point sources in Ghana and Uganda. Read more...
As argued several times, post-construction support is one of the keys to sustainability of rural water supplies. Read more...
Aid must be used to help local institutions not just develop infrastructure but also operate and maintain water and sanitation services well into the future. Read more...
Just as Orpheus descended into the underworld to bring his wife Eurydice back to life, the water sector invests heavily in bringing broken-down water supply systems back into function; often to find those same systems slipping back into disuse, as soon as the engineers turn their head to look away... Read more...
José Miguel is a circuit rider: a technician responsible for providing technical assistance to a number of water committees in his area around San Vicente in El Salvador. There are around 30 water systems on his circuit which he visits regularly. Read more...
Could lack of definition be undermining the impact of effective but costly support? Read more...
The world has changed over the past decade, and the change finally appears to be reaching the water sector. Countries such as China, Brazil and South Africa were able to ignore international policy prescriptions. But poorer countries, dependent on donors and their multilateral development bank... Read more...
How long is sustainable? 5 years? 20 years? 100 years? From here to eternity? Read more...
A field note by the Water and Sanitation Program - South Asia (WSP-SA) documents the evolution of three large, river-based schemes in Aliparamba Gram Panchayat near Kozhikode in the north of Kerala state, India. Read more...
A paper from the Asia Research Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science in the UK examines recent urban sector reforms and their implications for urban governance in India. Read more...