Strategy
The Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC) has a track record of almost two decades in networking and advocacy, and a secure institutional host in WHO. It is firmly established as one of the major global organizations concerned with water and sanitation for poor communities.
The number of people without sanitation is much greater than the number without water, while the agencies working in sanitation are fewer; therefore WSSCC has made a strategic decision to dedicate the vast majority of its effort to sanitation and hygiene, even though it will continue some work on water. Unlike water supply, the pace of sanitation improvements is in the hands of each household - this is one of the reasons why it has been so neglected by the international community compared to water.
The task of achieving the Millennium Development Goals - and the target for sanitation in particular - is so huge that every organization, including WSSCC, must increase and expand its work in every way possible. Therefore WSSCC has carefully analysed its comparative advantages and hence the best contribution it can make. Its main advantages are:
- Its strong membership ethos
- Its close links to grassroots-level work
- Its long experience of community management and of sanitation and hygiene
- Its durable institutional home in WHO.
These enable WSSCC to scale up proven approaches for sustainable improvements in sanitation and hygiene. It does this in three ways. The first two are its ongoing work in networking and in advocacy. The third is a sanitation and hygiene grants programme (entitled the Global Sanitation Fund) to provide a well-informed financing channel delivering funds efficiently to competent organizations in selected countries to accelerate their work in sanitation and hygiene. The three areas of activity complement each other:
- The networking and knowledge management generate proven ideas and methods for sanitation and hygiene,
- The advocacy communicates and promotes these ideas and methods,
- The Global Sanitation Fund finances organizations to implement these same ideas and methods at a larger scale. The lessons from the grantees’ work feed back both to the networking and to the advocacy.
Thus the three programmatic areas make up a coherent whole for WSSCC, whose impact and effectiveness is greater than the sum of its three parts.