Water, Sanitation and Hygiene
Water is life. Whether for food, irrigating fields, animal husbandry, or personal care, water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) are essential for health and development. They are human rights and part of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Challenge
But despite substantial gains in access to water, sanitation, and hygiene services over the past thirty years, it is estimated that 2.5 billion people worldwide still lack access to these basic human necessities. For those who have gained access, monitoring trends show that over time, WASH services consistently fail to function as intended. In Sub-Saharan African countries alone, up to 60% of rural water schemes are estimated to be non-functional or intermittently functional at any given time. Worldwide, low service sustainability contributes to nearly two million preventable deaths. Poor service conditions result in the spread of diseases, leading to child mortality and malnutrition. Women and girls suffer particularly. Not only are they often responsible for fetching water, but poor sanitary conditions can prevent them from attending school or finding work.
The impacts of poor service quality disproportionately affect communities that are rural, poor, and resource-limited. Accordingly, service sustainability is identified as a key challenge to be addressed for WASH-investments to deliver their intended public health impacts. Given the interconnected nature of financial, institutional, environmental, technological, and social factors that influence sustained service delivery, the sector has started to advocate for a ‘systems’ approach’ to sustain WASH service delivery.
WHH’s overall approach
Guided by its Global Strategy, WHH introduced a thematic portfolio describing and structuring the scope of its programmatic work towards zero hunger. This portfolio reflects our system transformative ambitions, the multi-thematic causalities to achieve sustainable food and nutrition security (UNICEF conceptual framework), and WHHs dual mandate as realized in the Humanitarian-Development-Peace nexus approach. WASH has a central position in Welthungerhilfe's thematic portfolio due to its outstanding importance in the fight against hunger and poverty.
WHH’s WASH capacity
In cooperation with local and international partners, WHH has developed a diverse WASH portfolio covering both humanitarian and development contexts. Prioritizing the user, addressing sustainability through a systems strengthening approach, transforming needs into demand, and promoting hygiene behavior change are all fundamental principles of WHH's WASH work. These principles aim to achieve universal access to WASH as a key pathway to reducing hunger and poverty.
With more than 120 projects that contain a WASH-component and a WASH implementation volume of about €100 million, WHH reaches around four million project participants, primarily located in the rural areas of sub-Sahara Africa and Southeast Asia. WASH focus projects are implemented over a period of almost 3 years covering the broad spectrum of water supply, sanitation, and hygiene promotion.
WHH's WASH Portfolio in 2024
29
Countries with active WASH projects
120
Active projects with a WASH component
€100m
Total volume of active WASH projects
4m
Direct participants in active WASH projects
How WHH addresses sustainability in WASH
Within the WASH sector there is a growing acknowledgement that existing approaches, which have traditionally focused on the installation and maintenance of hardware (e.g., hand pumps, latrines, hand-washing stations) and community-based management models, will not be sufficient on their own to meet the universal access and service targets of Sustainable Development Goal 6.
In 2016, Welthungerhilfe launched the Sustainable Services Initiative (SSI) to improve the sustainability of its water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) programming in 6 countries (Kenya, Uganda, Somali, Malawi, Nepal, Ethiopia). The approach involves working with country level partners to address common deep-rooted challenges such as inadequate financing, disjointed planning, limited ongoing support to communities and service providers, and weak monitoring and regulation. In 2017, WHH joined the Agenda for Change, a partnership which cultivates a way of working in the WASH sector that supports the delivery of sustainable services through systems strengthening.
Our impact: strengthening and transforming WASH systems
Building from the learning and progress generated with the Sustainable Services Initiative, in December 2021, WHH in collaboration with a series of experienced local implementing partners, started implementing a four-year BMZ-funded WASH system strengthening programme entitled ‘WASH System Strengthening in Fragile and Developing Contexts to Achieve Sustainable Development Goal Six.’ This programme is being implemented in four countries (India, Pakistan, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe). A central pillar of the programme is unlocking the barriers to sustainable and equitable services and supporting each country’s vision for WASH service provision. This is undertaken through a series of tailor-made activities and interventions implemented at the community and service provider, service authority, sub-national levels, based on the following theory of change.
Our partners and network
Welthungerhilfe engages with a broad network in the WASH sector, which provides opportunities to exchange with research and sector platforms, publish learnings and gain access to international forums. More information on our relationships to WASH partners can be found here.
Our Key Publications
