Advocacy for Water, Environmental Sanitation and Hygiene

This Thematic Overview Paper seeks to provide:

• Easy access to the main principles of advocacy for water, environmental sanitation and hygiene based on worldwide experiences and views of leading practitioners; and
• Direct links on the web to more detailed explanations and documented experiences of the topic.

According to the report, "the impending water and sanitation crisis in the developing world is a crisis ofgovernance and political will. Many governments are failing to address the needs of its poor and marginalised inhabitants who often pay a higher price than the rest of society for water and sanitation services."

The report states that a shift is needed so that civil society gets involved and people play a role in water management that helps prevent conflicts among communities and between countries. One problem is that "advocacy for prioritising water, sanitation and hygiene has never reached the grassroots level and has not involved wider civil society. Insufficient links have been made with social movement groups like women's groups, organisations of the urban poor, farmers cooperatives and local NGOs working on environment, against poverty, etc. Advocacy has been mainly directed at the professional and global bureaucracy levels."

The report provides a number of other reasons for some of the problems with advocacy in the water andsanitation sectors:

• too many initiatives or organisations dealing with water
• too many international conferences dealing with water without sufficient national follow-up
• too many good intentions from a relatively small group of internationals experts without real groundingin national and community settings
• too many messages
• a lack of concerted, well researched, monitored long-term advocacy and communication programming.

It is anticipated that this report will meet different aims of different users: "an introduction to, and a rationale for, Advocacy for Water, Environmental Sanitation and Hygiene for policy makers and programme planners and managers; access to recent research and case studies for researchers, educators and trainers; information on approaches and experiences of colleagues for practitioners; and opportunities for feedback or contributions."

Click here to access a related peer-reviewed summary on the Health e Communication website, and to participate in peer review.