Water, Sanitation & Hygiene (WASH)

Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH)

The leading environment-related risk factors for mortality in children, those that are causally related and/or associated with diarrheal disease, newborn infection, malnutrition, and pneumonia, include inadequate water supply, unsafe drinking water, and poor sanitation and hygiene behaviors. WASHplus aims to develop, introduce and deliver high-impact interventions in water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) and indoor air pollution (IAP), at sufficient scale to achieve increased access to improved water sources to meet domestic needs, improvement in drinking water quality taken from those sources as well as at the point-of-use, increased access to and use of sanitary facilities for human excreta disposal, and increased and improved handwashing with soap.

WASHplus builds on well-established programs and relationships and the expertise to take proven approaches to scale with partners. The project tests and offers innovative products and services through targeted operations research (OR). It institutionalizes WASH programs in countries by advocating and engaging governments to adopt policies, improve regulations, strengthen institutions, and dedicate budgets. The project emphasis is on integration programming – recognizing the individual household as the fundamental building block for any national scale WASH effort. It applies commercial sector expertise to create sustainable public-private partnerships and advance new credit strategies and financial packages with a focus on women. WASHplus is also creating a “program learning” cradle, through actionable monitoring and evaluation and robust knowledge management to ensure that new learning is shared with WASH partners and stakeholders in country, and globally.