Integrated projects

A woman teaches safe hygiene practices to children in Nepal.

Credit: WaterAid / Jim Holmes

WaterAid believes that together water, sanitation and hygiene education provide the key to poverty reduction. By focusing on projects that combine these three elements, health benefits are maximized and the results are long lasting and wide reaching.

Safe water

WaterAid and its local partners help rural villagers dig or drill wells that tap groundwater, build gravity-flow systems that convey water from upland streams and springs, and collect and store rainwater. In crowded cities, we also help connect slum communities to municipal water sources.

By bringing safe water closer to their homes, WaterAid brings people closer to realizing their social, economic, and full human potential.

Sanitation

Solutions vary from country to country, from rural to urban settings, and depend on local customs, which its partners help WaterAid understand and respect. In rural villages, the most common sanitation facility is usually a dry pit latrine, which individual households or small communities can build for themselves with a little advice and technical guidance. In cities, where solutions are more complex and larger in scale, we help community groups build latrines connected to municipal drainage systems or find innovative solutions to emptying communal latrines.

Hygiene education

Children learn about safe hygiene practices in Mozambique.

Credit: WaterAid / Jenny Matthews

Because taps and toilets are only as safe as the ways people use them, education is an integral part of WaterAid projects. If communities do not understand how water becomes polluted, their practices can easily contaminate it. People who do not wash their hands after using a sanitary latrine, for example, can spread disease. Simply washing hands with soap and water can reduce diarrheal diseases by over 40 percent.

The messages are straightforward, but changing longstanding practices is a challenge, and WaterAid is continually innovating approaches to altering unsafe behavior. WaterAid and its partner organizations promote hygiene education withpublic awareness campaigns, household discussions, demonstrations, radio programs,plays and puppet shows, picture books, games, posters, and videos that encourage people to:

• wash their hands, faces, bodies, and clothes
• safely dispose of feces, refuse, and wastewater
• prepare and store food properly
• protect their water supply and store water safely