Hello,

I think that your point about providing a dignified toilet for all is the key to this.

I can guarantee that wandering around with urine-soaked trousers or menstrual blood staining your skirt does not feel dignified in any way. Incontinence affects 29% of people and menstruation affects approximately 50% of people at some point in their life so these are hardly niche issues.

In my experience, though these may be the ideas that are currently making headlines, that does not mean that they have eclipsed the provision of basic facilities. There are still a huge number of organisations that are working away with little fanfare on providing toilets and hand washing facilities and pit emptying services and faecal sludge treatment processes in an attempt to ensure that we meet SDG6. Alongside that there are plenty of people working on the financial and advocacy approaches that underpin this provision of services.

As for hygiene programmes, we know hand washing is a vital step in preventing the spread of disease. Regardless of who you believe started pushing for them to happen, it would be a backward step to ignore hygiene. There may be challenges with the outcomes these programmes achieve in terms of long-term behaviour change but that is a case for strong monitoring, evaluation and learning how to improve rather than simply ignoring the issue.

Just because we don't hear about every sanitation project doesn't mean they aren't happening. There are plenty of unseen heroes in this sector and most of them are here because they believe in the same thing you do: dignity for all.

Thanks,

Becky

I intentionally made the topic headline quite sensational, but this is sort of a reply to this article (and other recent topics on the Susana forum) recently published and shared:

www.communityledtotalsanitation.org/node/1923

While I don't think the specific topic (the lack of incontinence awareness) is necessarily especially bad, some of the explanations really hit a nerve with me. For example:

In particular to reflect on the progress that we have made as a sector in working to ensure that the WASH needs of all are met and how we are no longer mainly focussing on the needs and priorities of men, the majority and those with the loudest voice.

Two to three decades ago, hardly anyone talked about gender or issues related to equity and inclusion, about accessibility for people with disabilities or mobility limitations, about menstrual hygiene or about the needs of people from vulnerable or marginalised groups. Even trying to discuss issues relating to gender and about the differing experiences and needs of women, men, girls and boys, was often met with derision and your views were dismissed.

While I am not long enough in this sector to remember three decades ago, the last one or two decades in WASH have been literally all about women and other marginalized groups. Now, as some of you might know, I am very much in favour of accessible WASH infrastructure and I also think that the focus on "women issues" in WASH isn't necessarily a bad one as they usually bear the most negative effects of inadequate WASH infrastructure or services. But very often it has gotten to the point were "male issues" were all but forgotten about (toilets at work-places, urinals etc. almost unheard of in most WASH discussions/publications).

But this is not all of it. One might argue that the entire original move to focus on the "hygiene" aspects was a very elaborate advertisement hijack of the NGO sector by large multinational soap firms. Of course there was most likely too little focus on behaviour-change aspects prior to that, but the results of wide-spread hand-washing campaigns (often without real improvements in WaS(H) services) are questionable in my view.

More recently MHM has gotten a lot of attention, which again is not necessarily bad, but it is a quite marginally WASH related health topic. I.e. one might as well argue anti-smoking campaigns should be a WaSH topic as smokers quite often go to the toilet to smoke... (but of course I am exaggerating here a bit as sanitary pad waste can be a serious issue in desludging, and that toilets often serve other purposes should not be overlooked).

Even more recently we had topics related to transsexuals (a hot media/political bubble right now in the US) or incontinence or basically what ever fringe interests with high media/commercial involvement you can think of...

Again, discussing these fringe topics is not necessarily bad, but it has (in my opinion) gotten to the point where a lot of funding and effort is put into these things, while the silent majority topics such as actually having a dignified (or just "improved") toilet is still a dream for more than 2 billion people on earth!

I also think that it is alienating (from participating in the WaSH sector) a lot of people either from countries that might not be as "post modern" as the loud voices these topics mostly seem to come from or just in general people with an technical mind-set that could actually help solving the real issues of the silent majority.

Food for thought... but often this makes me want to look for another job outside of the WaSH sector as it is very frustrating to see (for example) MHM being put into the spotlight with a lot of money spend on sanitary pad distribution, while actual toilets and water-supply are more of an afterthought and very badly implemented (due to a lack of actually qualified technicians left in the sector?)...