International Drinking Water Supply Research Articles

Water and the death of ambition in global health, c.1970-1990.

Economic development and good health depended on access to clean water and sanitation. Therefore, because economic development and good health depended on access to clean water and sanitation, beginning in the early 1970s the World Bank, the World Health Organization (WHO), and others began a period of sustained interest in developing both for the billions without either. During the 1980s, two massive and wildly ambitious projects showed what was possible. The International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade and the Blue Nile Health Project aimed for nothing less than the total overhaul of the way water was developed. This was, according to the WHO, "development in the spirit of social justice."

Impact of global initiatives on drinking water access in Africa

In a quest to achieve a sustainable supply of drinking water, most countries in Sub-Saharan Africa have adopted water supply models designed to meet targets set by continually changing global water initiatives (GWI). Consequently, strategies to deliver these GWI concomitantly changed after dominating water policy implementation at a particular time. The review observes that these changes often overlooked contextual setting and undermined smooth continuity from one initiative to another. The poor link between initiatives, therefore, allowed the factors responsible for poor access to persist. To that end, the International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade initiative (1981–1990) did not meet the target of ‘water for all’. Similarly, the International Water for Life Decade (2005–2015) failed to reduce by 50% the number of people without access as anticipated.

Dracunculiasis eradication and the legacy of the smallpox campaign: What's new and innovative? What's old and principled?

Coming on the heels the declaration of smallpox eradication in 1980 was the launch of the dracunculiasis (Guinea worm) eradication program, as a key outcome indicator of the success of the United Nations 1981-1990 International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade (IDWSSD). The dracunculiasis eradication campaign has carried on well beyond the close of the IDWSSD largely due to the efforts of President Jimmy Carter and The Carter Center, to assist the national Guinea Worm Eradication Programs in collaboration with partner organizations, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), UNICEF, and the World Health Organization. Dracunculiasis eradication efforts have as primary tools health education, filter distribution for drinking water filtration, and case containment, all guided by rigorous village based surveillance. Additional tools are treatment of selected water sources with ABATE(R) (temephos) larvicide and provision of protected drinking water supplies. Village volunteers provide monthly reporting of cases (including reports of zero cases). The global campaign has made remarkable progress through both innovation and adherence to eradication principles. Annual cases of dracunculiasis have decreased from 3.5 million in 1986 to less than 2000 in 2010. The challenge is to reach zero cases. The task, so often faced by eradication programs, is to finish the 'final inch' in some of the most difficult places on earth to work. In the case of dracunculiasis, that is the new Republic of South Sudan.

India needs a great sanitary awakening

Dear sir, I read the article titled “Environmental sanitation: An ignored issue in India” published in the April 2008 issue of your esteemed journal with keen interest. The author has chosen a vital subject that needs to be addressed urgently. Environmental sanitation is indeed still an ignored issue in India. This is evident from the facts available from the report of the National Family Health Survey-3 (NFHS-3), which throws light on some of the household characteristics like the type of house, safe drinking water and sanitation, cooking fuel and overcrowding.[1] It is reported that more than half of the households in India live in kachha/semipucca (14% kachha, 40% semipucca) houses. The proportion of households living in pucca houses is lowest in Manipur (10.7%). In 34% of the households, three to four persons and in 29% of the households, five or more persons share a single room for sleeping. Ninety percent of the rural households and 31% of the urban households use solid fuels for cooking, which generate smoke and unhealthy conditions when inhaled. About 90% of the households that use solid fuels cook on an open fire without diverting the smoke through a chimney. Although 88% of the households have access to an improved source of drinking water, only half the households reported having drinking water on their premises (51% urban, 28% rural). For 37% of the households, it takes up to 30 min and for the remaining 12% more than half an hour to fetch drinking water. Transportation and storage is known to cause contamination of water, but only 33%of the households treat their drinking water to improve its potability. More than half (55%) of the households (74% rural, 17% urban) have no toilet facility, the figure varying from 2% for Mizoram to 81.3% for Chhatisgarh. Only 29% of the households have toilet facilities that are improved and not shared with any other household. The survey about disposal of household (solid and liquid) and animal waste, which form a significant source of illness, is silent. Control of these factors has been responsible for a considerable improvement in the health of people during the past century in the developed countries. On the other hand much of the illness in India is due to poor environmental sanitation, i.e., unsafe drinking water, polluted soil, unhygienic disposal of human excreta and refuse, poor housing, insects and rodents.[2] The National Water Supply and Sanitation Programme was launched as early as 1954 and was supported by the Accelerated Rural Water Supply Programme (1971-72), the International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade (1981-90), the Rajiv Gandhi National Drinking Water Mission (1986), the Central Rural Sanitation Programme, the Total Sanitation Campaign and the Millennium Development Goals(2000) and similar programs. But, it is evident from facts reported by the NFHS-3 that the sanitary conditions have not changed much. The unsanitary conditions are appalling in India and[3] perhaps India also needs a great sanitary awakening like that which took place in London in the mid-nineteenth century.

Water as a Human Right in the MENA Region: Challenges and Opportunities

Even though hundreds of millions of people do not have access to clean drinking water and adequate sanitation, these issues only entered the global political agenda around the mid-1970s. The period 1981–90 was declared as the International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade, with the objective that everyone would have access to clean water and sanitation by its end. The Decade did not meet its objective. The issue was then chosen as a Millennium Development Goal, with the objective that by 2015 the number of people not having access to clean water can be reduced by half. By 2002, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of the United Nations reinterpreted Articles 11 and 12 of the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and concluded that water is a human right under this agreement. Several governments have opposed the concept that new rights can be derived by reinterpreting existing treaties. The paper analyses the developments leading to the recommendation that water is a human right, and then assesses the implications of this new development and its implementation potential in the developing world, especially for the Middle East and North African region. It identifies seven priority areas where research is now needed.

Challenges for water sustainability in Africa

Water lies at the heart of many of Africa's problems. Although Africa as a whole is only slightly below the world average in terms of the available water resources per capita, and better off than Europe or Asia, it is beset by three critical groups of problem, one largely natural, the second very definitely manmade, the third somewhere in-between. The first centres on the distribution and reliability of resources. The second is related to the distribution and growth in human population. The third is the intimate link between water and disease in Africa, and the widespread lack of access to safe drinking water amongst the poorer communities. Much of the water that is theoretically available is either naturally dangerous for human health or else polluted by human activities lack of sewage treatment or pollution from agriculture, mining and industry. Despite the WHO's International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade in the 1980s, and the WHO's continuing Water, Sanitation and Health activities, the numbers without access to safe water continue to grow (WHO, 2004 website). Over 300 million still lack access to safe water in sub-Saharan Africa. Lack of access to safe water is worst in rural areas, where women and children often spend considerable time fetching water: over 1 .2 billion people worldwide live more than 1 5 min walk from a safe water source, many in Africa (Rodda, 1994). In the Southern African Development Community, 56% of rural communities lack access to safe water, against only 22% in urban areas. High temperatures favour the proliferation of many microbes as well as vectors of disease like the Anopheles mosquito. It is estimated that if malaria had been properly tackled 30 years ago when effective control measures first became available, Africa's GDP would now be about $100 billion greater (World Health Organisation, 2001). Public health is, therefore, not solely a question of safe water provision, but also of sound management of the water environment in order to control all water-related disease. Together, these factors make the average per capita water resource statistic largely meaningless in practical terms. Africa's climatic location is a fundamental source of its problems. Straggling the equator and extending beyond both tropics, the climates of Africa are dominated by the Hadley Cells. These circulation cells create both the excessive rains on the rising limb along the Intertropical Convergence Zone around the equator and the desiccation of the adiabatically heated air on the sinking limb around the subtropics, which suppresses convective activity and rain formation. This results in a grossly uneven distribution of water resources, ranging from desert to equatorial rainforest. Fluctuations in the strength of the Hadley Cells, their associated monsoons and other elements of atmospheric circulation in the tropics, like the Biennial Oscillation and the Southern Oscillation, also result in considerable and often critical unreliability of rainfall throughout much of the continent. To this is now being added clearly discernable climatic change, some perhaps natural, some apparently related to human-induced global warming. The frequency of drought appears to have increased in recent decades, particularly in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa. Drought in tropical Africa is often associated with the reversals of ocean currents in the equatorial Pacific known as El Nino, which have been getting more intense in recent years. At the same time, there have been some unusually intense tropical cyclones emanating from the western side of the Indian Ocean in the southern hemisphere. The hurricane seasons in 1999-2001 were especially problematic: the worst event for 50 years occurred between January and March 2000, when Cyclones Eline, Gloria and Hudah saw 150,000 ha flooded in Mozambique, hundreds killed and over 1 .25 million made homeless in southern Africa, including Botswana, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Madagascar. There are, however, some more purely human elements in the increasing frequencies of droughts and flood disasters. Overgrazing, deforestation and devegetation have created long-term changes in the water balance of many desert margins, increasing the proportion of rainfall draining away as storm runoff, thereby increasing flood problems, eroding the top soil, reducing soil moisture retention and decreasing the recharge of aquifers. The eminent climatologist, Reid Bryson, has even suggested that increased dust from agricultural activity in semiarid regions has increased the atmospheric albedo or reflectivity, cooling the upper air and so inducing air subsidence which suppresses potentially rain-creating convective cells even further (Bryson and Murray, 1977). The net result has been that the West African monsoon has penetrated less far northwards into the Sahel in recent decades, aggravating the incidence of drought and famine. Similarly, the devastating Nile floods of 1988 were created by a combination of the 1000-year rainfall event and more rapid runoff caused by deforestation in the headwaters. Floods like these also carry risks for public health, increasing the incidence of diarrhoea, dysentery, cholera

STATUS AND CONSTRAINTS OF SAFE WATER AND HYGIENIC SANITATION PROGRAM: A STUDY OF FIVE VILLAGES OF BATIAGHATA THANA, KHULNA, BANGLADESH

Immense importance of safe water and hygienic sanitation has instigated the United Nations to declare 1981-1990 as the “International Drinking Water Supply And Sanitation decade”. Giving proper response with the global community, Bangladesh has launched a pragmatic program for ensuring safe water and hygienic sanitation in the early `90s. During 1981-1992, the decadal progress of the nation-wide program had been very slow. After 1992 it has gained momentum with the increased involvement of NGO’s and other international agencies. But the progress is not uniform throughout the country due to some limiting factors. Specially, in the remote rural areas of southern Bangladesh, the program is yet to reach its target. This paper has identified the erroneous service delivery mechanism, lack of health awareness of the rural people along with others couple of factor as the prime impediments in the way of program expansion in the study villages of Batiaghgata thana of Khulna districts. Lastly, it puts forward some recommendations to make the program a success in the study area.

Criteria for successful sanitation programmes in low income countries.

In the International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade (1981-90), the development of a consensus on the concept of sanitation and the planning and implementation of effective and efficient sanitation programmes was not emphasized. Yet lack of good sanitation is a growing burden and environmental threat. Significant improvement of human health cannot be achieved without good environmental sanitation conditions and practices. A consensus on what makes a sanitation programme successful can help to conserve limited funds and spend those available more wisely. It will also help to reduce the increasing flows of waste poisoning precious sources of drinking water. This article was written to stimulate discussion on what attributes can be taken as characteristic of good environmental sanitation programmes, and on which indicators can be used to assess those attributes in actual sanitation programmes.

Eradicating guinea worm without wells: unrealized hopes of the Water Decade.

At the start of the United Nations International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade in the 1980s, guinea worm disease was targeted as the major indicator of the success of the Decade's efforts to promote safe water. By the late 1980s, most of the guinea worm endemic countries in Africa and South Asia had established guinea worm eradication programmes that included water supply as one of their main technical strategies. By surveying the water supply situation in Ifeloju Local Government Area (LGA) in Oyo State, Nigeria, in June 1996, as a case study, it was possible to determine the role that water supply has played in the eradication effort. Although two major agencies, the former Directorate for Food, Roads and Rural Infrastructure and UNICEF, provided hand dug and bore-hole wells respectively in many parts of the LGA, coverage of the smaller farm hamlets has been minor compared to efforts in the larger towns. This is ironic because the farm hamlets served as a reservoir for the disease in the 1980s, such that when the piped water system in the towns broke down, guinea worm was easily reintroduced into the towns. The survey of 188 ever-endemic hamlets with an estimated population of 23,556 found that 74.3% of the people still drink only pond water. Another 11.3% have wells that have become dysfunctional. Only 14.4% of this rural population has access' to functioning wells. Guinea worm was eliminated from 107 of the hamlets mainly by the use of cloth filters and chemical treatment of ponds. While this proves that it is possible to eradicate guinea worm, it fails to leave behind the legacy of reliable, safe water supplies that was the hope of the Water Decade.

Dracunculiasis eradication: almost a reality.

The idea of a global campaign to eradicate dracunculiasis was first proposed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 1980, during the advent of the International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade (IDWSSD) (1981-1990). In 1981, the Steering Committee of the IDWSSD adopted eradication of dracunculiasis as a subgoal of their efforts to provide safe drinking water to unserved populations. In 1988, African ministers of health voted to eradicate dracunculiasis by the end of 1995, a target date that was endorsed by UNICEF in 1989 and the World Health Assembly in 1991. Although nine of 18 endemic countries, India (1980), Pakistan (1987), Nigeria and Cameroon (1988), Ghana (1989), and Mauritania, Benin, Burkina Faso, and Togo (1990) completed national searches for cases of the disease, only four countries, India (1983), Pakistan (1988), Ghana (1989), and Nigeria (1989), actually started eradication programs during the 1980s. The remaining 14 endemic countries began their eradication programs between 1991 and 1995. At the end of 1996, dracunculiasis had not been entirely eradicated, but its incidence had been reduced by 95%, from an estimated 3.2 million cases in 1986 to 152,805 cases in 1996. Sudan reported a total of 118,578 (78%) of the 152,805 cases of dracunculiasis reported during 1996. Insufficient funding and the civil war in Sudan continue to be the major obstacles to overcome. A primary aim of the eradication program in 1997 is to seek to ensure that all cases of dracunculiasis outside of Sudan are contained. In Sudan the challenge is to pursue all appropriate control measures in all accessible areas as vigorously as possible until political circumstances allow access to all of the remaining affected areas.

Improving human welfare through appropriate technology: government responsibility, citizen duty or customer choice.

This paper explores recent attempts to improve the effectiveness of environmental health programmes and projects by reference to the International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade (1980-1990) and beyond. Reference is made to how water and sanitation as technical interventions have drawn upon the natural sciences, notably concepts of race and sex, and the social sciences including culture and gender, for their authority and legitimacy. A new and apparently progressive movement, the Water Decade sought to challenge the powerful and enduring high tech image of development on which much western environmental and social transformations have been based. Beginning as a critique of modernism with a commitment to basic needs as human rights, it was driven by a recognition that sophisticated technology could not satisfy human health needs. Alternative technologies would, by contrast, cater for a more extensive and varied market and would promote participatory approaches to service delivery. The paper demonstrates how, during the course of the Decade, sections of the aid community began to redefine basic needs as commodities involving the efficient marketing and delivery of a product with minimal state intervention. Within a shifting international political and economic context, it examines the changing role of the expert and the links being forged between large donors, non-governmental organisations and the private sector. The significance of this reformulated progressivism for the development debate is then considered, notably in relation to concepts of citizenship, consumer choice and the role of the state.

Update: Dracunculiasis Eradication— Ghana and Nigeria, 1994

Dracunculiasis (guinea worm disease) is a disabling infection that each year affects an estimated 5 million persons in 17 African countries and parts of India and Pakistan. This disease is contracted only by persons who drink water contaminated by tiny copepods containing larval stages of the parasite Dracunculus medinensis. The infection can be prevented by providing safe sources of drinking water, teaching populations at risk to boil water or filter it through a fine cloth, or treating the water with temephos (Abate*). Efforts to eradicate dracunculiasis began in 1981, immediately before the start of the International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade. This report summarizes the progress of guinea worm eradication programs (GWEPs) in Ghana and Nigeria.

Information: Ritual or Tool? The Production and Use of Information in Development Agencies

Summary Mariken Vaa, ‘Information: Ritual or Tool? The Production and Use of Information in Development Agencies’, Forum for Development Studies, 1995:1, pp. 61–76. The starting point for this article is how aid organisations have handled information relating to one particular field of development assistance: improved water supply and sanitation services. The first part gives an outline of various efforts undertaken during the International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade, where the aim was to deliver sustainable and affordable services. Production and provision of information were important elements in these endeavours. The second part reviews how the Nordic bilateral agencies revised their sector policies in light of their own experiences from the field and the international activities they supported. The final section is a discussion of the challenge facing libraries as tools of development, in light of the twin propensities of organisations to suppress data and to gather more information than they use.

Dracunculiasis Eradication: Beginning of the End

Beginning with the International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade (1981-1990), an increasingly broad coalition of international and bilateral agencies, organizations, private companies, and other institutions have joined forces to eradicate dracunculiasis (Guinea worm disease). From an estimated annual incidence of 10 million persons just before the campaign began, the remaining incidence of cases is now less than two million. More than 23,000 villages are known to be endemic. All 18 countries where the disease is still endemic have completed or begun nationwide searches to identify endemic villages, except Kenya. Dracunculiasis is nearly eradicated in Asia, where Pakistan found only 23 cases in 1992, and India found 1,081 cases. Cameroon and Senegal are close to achieving eradication in Africa, where the two formerly highest endemic countries, Nigeria and Ghana, reduced their combined total of cases from approximately 820,000 in 1989 to less than 240,000 in 1992. Much remains to be done, however, in francophone West Africa and especially in East Africa. The most serious current obstacles to eradicating dracunculiasis by 1995 are the civil war in Sudan, apathy of some national and international health officials, and inadequate funding for the campaign.

CANADIAN PERSPECTIVES ON WATER SUPPLY AND SANITATION IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

Almost all Canadians have safe drinking water and hygienic systems for waste disposal. The situation in less affluent countries is much less fortunate. In 1980, less than half the 3 200 million people in developing countries had access to the basic services.In a global effort aimed at improving this situation, the United Nations declared the period 1981–1990 as the International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade. This paper reviews the experience of the recently ended Decade and outlines the challenges and opportunities of the 1990s.Quantitative results during the Decade were impressive. More than 1 300 million people gained access to safe drinking water, and about half as many to adequate sanitation. Qualitative results were even more impressive, with the evolution of improved approaches to providing affordable and sustainable services.The Canadian International Development Agency made substantial contributions to water supply and sanitation programs during the past Decade. Disbursements from t...

The International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade: Dogmatic Means to a Debatable End

The International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade (1981-1990), has called for a whole new approach to water sector development. The spotlight is on communities - community participation, community management, community financing - and away from national and local government structures. In this paper it is argued that the Decade rhetoric has not created the capacity and infrastructural networks to achieve and sustain its objective of universal water and sanitation coverage. The result is a contradiction between strategy and structures. It is concluded that community participation and community management may be conducive to achieving the Decades target; but are not sustainable alternatives to strong local and national government institutions in the water sector.

Assessment and evaluation of the International Water Decade.

The International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade (1981-90) has ended without reaching its declared goal of providing all people with safe drinking water and proper sanitation. The effect of drinking water and sanitation on health has been established, and the 2 components have been included in the World Health Organization (WHO) global campaign for Health For All by the year 2000, and in the global Primary Health Care programme. The assessment of the achievements has been based on coverage rates expressed in percentage. The findings were computerised. High population growth rates in the developing countries hampered and reduced the coverage. Other hindering factors included the lack of appropriate technology, the preference of the small privileged urban areas over the vast rural areas, the lack of the simultaneous approach in the development of water and sanitation and poor involvement of health education in the activities of the Water Decade. The water and sanitation development activities of the last decade have to be carried forward and continued during the present decade, in a different approach and alternative methods.

Planning Water Supply and Sanitation Projects in Developing Countries

Despite the laudable objectives of the International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade (IDWSSD) launched in 1980, developing countries are still faced with inadequate water supply and poor sanitation in rural and periurban areas. This problem may be attributable to the issue of equity in the provision of water supply and sanitation. In most developing countries, governments still provide water supply and sanitation mostly to urban areas whilst the rural and urban fringes are poorly served. There are case histories of project failures in rural areas due to many factors including choice of inappropriate technology, lack of effective backup support, noninvolvement of user community in the planning and implementation process, and implementation of projects for political gains. In order to solve these problems, the issue of equity should be vigorously pursued in the development of water supply and sanitation projects. A sequential procedure for total involvement of the user community in the planning construction, operation, and maintenance is proposed here to help provide equity.

Community based approaches in water supply and sanitation programme ? An Indian experience

With the onset of the International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade (IDWSSD), 1981–1990, global policies and strategies were evolved for the effective planning, implementation and monitoring of water supply and sanitation programmes. In the introduction of IDWSSD policies in water supply programmes, socio-economic aspects have been given equal importance to the hardware aspects. The responsible water bodies and donor countries realised the need for an integrated approach in the water supply sector ultimately. Socio-economic Units in Kerala was conceptually formulated during 1984–85 in order to meet the guidelines under IDWSSD. In 1984 both the governments of the Netherlands and Denmark launched a joint mission to develop a systamatic frame work for the implementation of three Socio-Economic Units and a Co-ordinating office to work jointly with the Kerala Authority (KWA). The three units are located in the North, Central and Southern parts of Kerala State. Each units covered a project area which consists of 600000 population. The activities are mainly concentrated in 73 panchayaths, where the 11 bilateral water supply schemes are under implementation. The activities includes community education, community mobilization, inter-sectoral and intra-departmental co-ordination and collaboration, human resources development and institutional development including appropriate training programmes, establishment of viable and realistic management information systems etc. The major thrust of the programme interventions are on developing micro-level planning and implementation systems and procedures at the ward level. The results of these experiments would be available by the end of 1990.

The International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade in retrospect and implications for the future

In global terms this paper reviews the progress made during the International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade. There has been considerable progress. In terms of percent receiving water services, the urban areas made good progress: 77% in 1980 to 82% in 1990. In the rural areas progress was even greater, 30% had water services in 1980 versus 63% in 1990. There was also considerable progress in institutional terms. A positive trend towards better linkage betweeen authorities dealing with water supply and sanitation and those dealing with economic development, was one. Another was the awareness of the need for community involvement. In some cases progress was hampered by fragmentation of governmental authorities dealing with water and sanitation at the rural and/or urban level. In the 1990s an important issue will be financing the infrastructure needed to bring water and sanitation services to those not already covered and to an increasing population. Institutional issues will continue to be important as well.