Esther Shaylor explains why she’s cleaning up Wikipedia and how it relates to her work as a water and sanitation engineer. When I was at college I was sternly warned to stay away from Wikipedia. The reason; because it can’t be verified as a resource, anyone can edit it and put anything up there. But increasingly over the years I …
The ladies’ room
Kerry Akers talks about the careful considerations and interdisciplinary collaboration needed to ensure that protection work is not based on harmful assumptions. umanitarian camps are dark at night. The curfew is sunset and the camp is heaving. Spilling out of their crowded tents onto the streets, people sit around dim cooking stoves talking and waving the mosquitoes away. The streets …
The forgotten nexus of sanitation, hygiene & water: Is this the inhibitor to progress?
In the lead-up to World Toilet Day, Oxfam’s Katie Whitehouse looks at how water, sanitation, hygiene and development are connected. n the 1800s, towns and cities across the world, including London, were battling cholera epidemics. Before John Snow published his theory in 1849 that cholera was a waterborne disease, efforts to manage poor sanitation and hygiene were minimal. The realisation …
Making standards practical is critical to sanitation innovation for rapidly expanding urban areas in developing countries
WASH solutions can only implemented when they work in context. Coming up to World Toilet Day, Katie Whitehouse explains why, in some cases, standards may not be achievable. ontainer based sanitation social enterprises are pushing the boundaries in decentralised sanitation management and yet continue to be classified as an unimproved form of sanitation. There are social enterprises – Sanivation, SOIL, …
The dilemma of managing toilets
Where there are no sewers to connect to, we need to find other ways to manage waste. Here Katie Whitehouse looks at some of the issues that come with having a functioning toilet. t is pretty terrible that in 2016 over 2.4 billion people still do not have access to a toilet (even a basic pit latrine). A toilet seems …
Toilet access is dominating programme delivery but what is the point of building more toilets if we cannot manage them?
Tomorrow is World Toilet Day and here, Katie Whitehouse looks at how building a toilet isn’t the end of the story and we need sustainable approaches to Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH). Building a toilet and marking it as a metric achieved is relatively easy. Building a toilet and ensuring that it is continuously serviced and the waste collected transported …
Responding to our toilet duties: An important subject!
Sanitation in emergency contexts must consider a diverse range of social, environmental, cultural and economic parameters. Jenny Lamb explores what this means for Oxfam and for Water Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) practitioners more broadly. From the Haiti earthquake in Port-au-Prince to the refugee crisis in Ethiopia and the displacement of communities in South Sudan every new situation presents us with challenges. …
Institutionalising gender in emergencies: Ethiopia gender analysis
Understanding needs and context is vital in an emergency response. A crucial, and often overlooked, factor in this is gender. Here, Steph Avis, introduces the first of a series of reports from the ECHO funded project ‘Institutionalising Gender in Emergencies’. n a humanitarian disaster the experiences of men, women, girls and boys can be very different. Access to basic goods and …