１０３８：ＷＡＳＨのフォロー開始

以前はＩＷＲＭに関しての報道をフォローしていたが、そのうち報道もされなくなった。そういう運命は分かっていた。

さて、水と衛生と云う深刻な課題についてはアフリカを中心として刻々と情報が入ってくることが分かった。このブログでも随時報告する。勿論、水と衛生も沢山ある「統合」の一つではある。

今回はガーナの新聞報道から。

Africa: Just Building a Million Latrines Won’t Solve Sanitation Crisis

The deadline for the world to meet its millennium development goals is now only four years away, yet in sub-Saharan Africa, there are still 570 million people without adequate sanitation.

Many technologies designed to solve the problems are parachuted. Some work, most don’t. The lesson should be simple: know the area, know the people.

It is only through talking and listening to the people on the ground that we will be able to make long-lasting and sustainable moves out of poverty. This is especially pertinent when trying to educate people about sanitation and hygiene and bringing about a change in behaviour.

Local knowledge is everything. WaterAid conducted its own research across west Africa into different ethnic groups’ attitudes to going to the toilet. The results go some way to explaining why simply building a latrine is only half the battle.

WaterAid is adapting an approach known as community-led total sanitation (CLTS) in west Africa. First conceived in Bangladesh, it is a concept that has been sweeping across south Asia with impressive results, and many are hoping that it can bring similar results to Africa. It is based on an understanding that the people themselves have the solutions and are best able to determine which interventions will enable them to attain a self-defined, collective destiny.

Instead of focusing on the supply and installation of sanitation hardware to communities, CLTS focuses on changing attitudes and behaviour through community mobilisation to stop open defecation, and to build and use latrines.

Participants have reported that they find the approach engaging, participatory and, most notably, empowering putting them in control of their own destiny, in a context in which, more often than not, death by disease is accepted with fatalistic submission to the ‘will of God’ or the hex of an enemy or the local witch.

Empowering local communities especially women with information that allows them to make decisions pertaining to their health and wellbeing ensures that they “own” the desired change. It is they who can be credited for the health benefits of safe sanitation and hygiene practices. It is they who commit to the necessary behaviour change, they who hold themselves and their peers accountable. Here, help is not coming from outside, but from within and people are in charge of their own destiny.

Source: Juanita During, The Ghanaian Journal, 27 January 2011