Stories
Upon the launch of the State of the World's Sanitation report in 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) along with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the Eastern and Southern Africa Water and Sanitation (ESAWAS) regulators association and the Bill ...
Accelerating Sanitation Towards 2030 is a World Toilet Day event to kick off UN-Water’s advocacy initiative that calls for increasingly rapid progress towards Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6: sanitation and water for all by 2030. The event on Friday 18 ...
World Toilet Day would not be complete without the appearance of the giant inflatable toilet on the front lawn of the UN headquarters in New York! After a three year absence due to COVID-related restrictions, the enormous icon will be ...
Groundwater forms the most important source of water supply in many urban, peri-urban and rural areas of Zambia meeting, in some cases, 100 per cent of the demand. In Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, inadequate city planning and provision of ...
The world is off track to meet SDG 6 - to ensure water and sanitation for all by 2030. Governments and the international community must accelerate change, but how? Where are the gaps in financing, human resources and policy? Who ...
Growing and protecting the sanitation workforce is vital to improving sanitation globally. Yet there is a lack of research and evidence on sanitation workers particularly in low- and middle-income countries. A new research agenda aims to address this evidence gap ...
What happens when the pit is full? What happens when there are either no toilet facilities or the existing ones are of poor quality? What happens after the toilet is flushed? The fact of the matter is that faecal sludge ...
The second edition of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Sanitation Safety Planning (SSP) manual includes simplified approaches, greater alignment with WHO Guidelines on sanitation and health, and a deeper focus on climate risk and adaptation As identified in WHO's Guidelines ...
The World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and the World Bank, launch the report State of the world's drinking water: An urgent call to action to accelerate progress on ensuring safe drinking water for all ...
Six years into the SDG period, the world is not on track to achieve universal access to basic WASH in schools by 2030. Achieving universal coverage requires a 14x increase in current rates of progress on basic drinking water, a ...
Sabuhene school in northwestern Tanzania never used to be the automatic choice for parents. Everyone was concerned about the safety of the pit latrines and the fragile buildings over them. To make matters worse, 700 pupils had to share eight ...
In low-and middle-income countries, small towns are growing rapidly and struggling to meet the increased demands of wastewater collection and treatment. To avert public health crises and continued environmental degradation, small towns are actively seeking safely managed sanitation solutions, appropriate ...
Africa's cities are growing at an unprecedented rate. In Kenya alone, the urban population, currently at 12 million, will more than triple to 40 million by 2050. As Nairobi has grown, more and more poor urban dwellers have been pushed ...
Scientists estimate that there is 100 times as much groundwater on Earth as there is freshwater on its surface. Globally, groundwater resources are under increasing pressure due to overexploitation, pollution and climate change. The world’s response to this pressure is ...
The Menstrual Health and Hygiene Resource Package from the World Bank’s Water Global Global Practice and the Global Water Security and Sanitation Partnership (GWSP) contains tools to help WASH projects respond to the needs of women and girls. The resources ...
The major challenges of our time - poverty, gender inequality, poor health, climate change are deeply intertwined with water and sanitation. When communities lack sanitation services, girls who are menstruating must stay home from school, and infectious disease is more ...
Lead is a priority chemical hazard that should be included in national drinking-water quality standards and monitored as part of drinking-water quality surveillance. This document from the World Health Organization (WHO) provides practical guidance to support the assessment and management ...
In March 2018, the United Nations Secretary-General launched a global call to action for WASH in all health care facilities, noting that health care facilities are essential tools in reducing disease, and that without basic WASH services, health care facilities ...
Despite efforts to promote hand hygiene, the rates of access to hand hygiene facilities remain stubbornly low. If current rates of progress continue, by the end of the SDG era in 2030, 1.9 billion people will still lack facilities to ...
An innovative Kenyan company is working to combat the issues of deforestation and poor sanitation at the same time. How? By using human waste to make clean, sustainable charcoal. At the company’s facility, waste collected from toilets is brought on ...
The Toilet Board Coalition are inviting corporates involved in school development programmes to engage in research that will identify gaps, challenges, and successes, specifically focusing on investments and the social and economic returns for private sector engagement. Over 600 million ...
In March 2023, the world will come together in New York for the UN 2023 Water Conference. The Conference will be a watershed moment that brings stakeholders from all sectors together. The aim is to accelerate change and this will ...
WASH debates, hosted by IRC, provide an informal platform for Dutch organizations and professionals working in the international water sector to connect and to discuss the latest developments and trends in the sector. The upcoming debate will focus on experiences ...
Parliaments and parliamentarians play a critical role in ensuring accountable, participatory, transparent governance which is necessary for inclusive and sustainable development. However, this critical role faces numerous challenges. On Thursday 20 October 2022, Sanitation and Water for All (SWA) launched ...
In this short article for World Toilet Day hosted by the International Water Association (IWA), Catarina de Albuquerque, Executive Chair of SWA (Sanitation and Water for All) says that, “Unfortunately, while we’ve made significant advancements, we are not on track ...
Around half of all drinking water globally comes from groundwater, and a quarter of all water withdrawn for irrigation. Safely managed sanitation can protect groundwater and in turn the right to drinking water and to a healthy environment. Groundwater and ...
The UN-Water Summit on Groundwater 2022 aims to bring attention to groundwater at the highest international level. Held in December 2022, the Summit will use the UN World Water Development Report 2022 as a baseline and the SDG 6 Global ...