WaSH-UPP · Water, Sanitation and Hygiene in sub-Saharan Africa: Understanding Policy and Practice
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2018-05-01 → 2020-08-15
- EU contribution
- €195,455
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Water, Sanitation and Hygiene in sub-Saharan Africa: Understanding Policy and Practice
Unsafe drinking water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene are still a major challenge in developing countries. Available statistics for sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) continues to hamper development efforts through avoidable deaths and diseases. Of the global deaths from the one billion people without access to treated drinking water and 2.5 billion lacking adequate sanitation, over 83% is concentrated in SSA. The Ebola and other infectious diseases outbreaks in the region are much related to the inability to get the WaSH act right. Indeed, WaSH challenge in SSA is complicated by the inability to disentangle it from socio-cultural behaviours and religious beliefs, which in some cases are reproduced at the policy arena. This raises the fundamental question of how scientific evidence related to WaSH is communicated and translated at the policy domains in the region. The major challenge in SSA not only rests on poorly developed WaSH policy environment and other forms of institutional arrangements; it also lies in the inability to connect domestic WaSH policies with local science and environmental contexts. In other words, why is it difficult to develop and sustain evidence-based policies in the WaSH sector? So much knowledge is produced, but much less knowledge synthesis happens in the WaSH sector. Most of the local and policy tools in the sector are either drawn from the available colonial sources or prescriptions of major multilateral organizations and international NGOs, and some scientific literature produced from a different contextual environment. More so, the political commitment to solving the WaSH sector problem hardly exists. This project represents an important first step to addressing the WaSH sector challenges by building capacity through research and public education. The overall objective involves exploring how scientists and policy makers collaborate in addressing the various challenges associated with water, sanitation and hygiene (WaSH) in Sub-Saharan Africa using Nigeria and Malawi as case study countries.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Science underpins Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WaSH) policies by promoting improved understanding of ‘processes’ and ‘practices’ and providing evidence enabling effectiveness, or ‘impact’ to be evaluated. However, knowledge exchange between stakeholders rarely runs smoothly, without translational challenges. This project, ‘Water, Sanitation and Hygiene: Understanding Policy and Practice’ (WaSH-UPP) will explore the grand challenge of ‘water and sanitation for all’, recently codified in UNESCO’s Sustainable Development Goal 6 with particular focus on sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), exploring how formal and informal institutions intersect to shape policy practices. This will be achieved through comparative analysis of two globally significant exemplars (Nigeria and Malawi) (i) mapping the critical actors in the WaSH-UPP-nexus;( ii) evaluating the features of science-policy discourse in both countries; (iii) revealing knowledge co-production practices; and (iv) elaborating how institutional processes interact to shape change. Despite the centrality of WaSH to human wellbeing and societal development, widespread improvements in practices in SSA remains slow, with well-recognized barriers including cultural/religious beliefs, weakly developed water services infrastructure and socio-economic factors including gender relations. WaSH-UPP will use a range of discourses, theories, and methods to compare issues across diverse field contexts. A five month secondment (split into two phases) to the Scottish Government’s Hydro Nation Scholars Programme in the SG Water Industry Team in Edinburgh. This will enable a broadening of the WaSH stakeholder base to include international innovation services and draw in expertise from small-medium and micro-enterprises that help bridge capacity gaps leading to greater impact. A WaSH science-policy context for each country will be developed to draw out commonalities/differences as a diagnostic to answer what is working, and what is not, and why.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITY OF DUNDEE · DundeeCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union