nd hygiene-care practices are essential to ensuring that children get the best start in life; that they are able to enter school healthy, alert and ready to learn. The lack of WASH in schools indicators in the 2015 MDGs may have led to a lack of attention and funding. Without adequate indicators and data, it has been difficult to make appropriate policy decisions by national governments to prioritize WASH in schools. The post-2015 MDGs attempt to mitigate that gap. We need to continue to build our efforts not only in empirical scientific evidence but also in our practical know-how around WASH in schools.
Clearly, the proposed list will need to be paired down, however, the proposed indicators on WASH in schools by the JMP Post-2015 Working groups address the multi-dimensionality of WASH access – reliability, sustainability, safety – that were lacking in previous versions. In addition, there is a strong equity component missing from the 2015 MDGs, which led to the world “achieving” the water target, even when the poor were mostly excluded from access. Collection of the Post-2015 WASH and WASH in schools indicators will focus attention on health and development aspects of improved WASH and help target funding towards sustainable, safe, and affordable access by donors and governments.
Side: Yes they are
Clearly the list of indicators is too long at the moment. The final indicators, like the 2015 MDG targets, will need to be simple and monitor-able. The problem with this, as the list of existing suggestions indicates, is that school WASH is more complex than most of us imagined (and than most people still imagine). Like all public services, to be sustainable, school WASH involves financing, governance (including institutional support to and accountability of service providers), technology choices and associated supply chains, and social/normative change. The list is daunting. And Matt has rightly pointed out that having no measure of hygiene in the last MDGs was a mistake. Hand washing is still a lagging practice wherever we look, despite its paramount importance.
As they can never hope to measure both the level of service and the systems necessary to sustain those services, these indicators will exist basically to create political will and spur increased investment. From my perspective, a reasonable proxy for this would be to include perhaps one simple metric for water, sanitation and hygiene services each plus one metric on investment levels (perhaps an amount/pupil/year?) that can spur funding allocation decisions.
Side: Yes they are
WASH activities should be included as Individual Goal, unlike that included as a part of Goal No-7 in earlier MDGs. Researchers have already established that the fact that improved WASH activities are the prime need in all fronts including Household and Community level to create far reaching impacts on HUMAN health.
So WASH activites should be a new Goal with renewed focus on the following :
(a) Water Safety and Security including Water Quality Monitoring and necessary precationary / remediation measures.
(b) Priority water scarce / quality affected regions.
(c) Monitoring mechanism for use and maintenance of Sanitation facilities to address bottlenecks leading to slipping back from coverage pattern.
(d) Total Environmental Sanitation including the proper Solid and Liquid Waste Management activities.
(e) Facilitating Operation and Maintenace for WASH infrastructures in households as well as Instititions like, Schools, Community oriented facilities etc. eventually to ensure sustainability.
(f) Instituionalised approach for capacity development to establish social equity / norms for the alround development of the communities with special thrust for the marginal sections.
(g) Massive approach on Hygienic practices for personal / food Hygiene.
(h) Aiming on effectiveness of WASH in Schools, the teachers / students community should be targetted as a major stakeholder with enhanced capacity / involvement.
(i) Necessary efforts / action plan during EMERGENCY SITUATION causing large scale displacement