ACCESSanitation 2nd National Cities Workshop
Accelerating City to City Exchange for Sustainable Sanitation

 

16/03/2011

 

According to the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring report 2010: Progress on Sanitation and Drinking Water, 39% of the world’s population, or 2.6 billion people, live without access to improved sanitation. The majority of these people live in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.


The overall objective of ACCESSanitation is to enable local authorities to promote and initiate sustainable sanitation solutions thus improving health conditions, alleviating poverty, fostering the local economy and increasing food security. Given the current drive towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and with the current sanitation situation within Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, projects such as ACCESSanitation often act as key drivers of change at the local level.


ICLEI Africa’s Water and Sanitation workstream attended the 2nd National Cities workshops (as part of a North-South and South-South exchange of knowledge and best practice on sustainable sanitation) in order to present examples of city sanitation plans and sustainable sanitation case studies from within Sub-Saharan Africa to the workshop participants.


The two regional workshops were held in New Delhi, India, from 2-5 February and in San Fernando, Pampanga, Philippines from 7-10 February. The workshops provided an opportunity for the project partners to discuss the progress made to date. The project partners include ICLEI’s regional secretariats: Europe, South Asia, South East Asia and Africa, while the technical partners from the two regions are Xavier University (Philippines) and EcoSan Services Foundation (India), as well as Seeconsult and representatives from the 10 participating cities in India and the Philippines.

 


The workshop aimed to:


-    provide feedback from the city participants regarding their stakeholder engagement, city sanitation surveys and the rationale behind their choice of focal area for their sanitation interventions;


-    provide an overview of sustainable sanitation criteria that should be considered when implementing interventions;


-    highlight the importance of stakeholder engagement, in that sanitation solutions need not be limited to hardware options but should also consider software initiatives, such as behavioural change and awareness-raising campaigns;


-    increase the delegates’ exposure to on-the-ground sustainable sanitation initiatives and to provide a platform for knowledge exchange pertaining to sustainable sanitation within the project regions.

 

 

Mayor of San Fernando joins ACCESSanitation City Participants and project partners for the Second National Training Workshops in San Fernando, Pampanga, Philippines.