Global WASH Campaign

The centrepiece of the Collaborative Council's advocacy activities is the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene for All (WASH) initiative: a high-profile global advocacy campaign aimed at raising public and political awareness of safe water supply, adequate sanitation and hygiene services. Core to the WASH campaign is its people-centered approach, which focuses particularly on the unserved poor, women, children and young people.

Launched in 2001, the WASH campaign was initially a response to the failure of world leaders to recognize sanitation as a goal at the UN Millennium Summit in 2000. Therefore, its primary aim was to mobilize support for bringing sanitation and hygiene to the global agenda and a significant step was accomplished with the addition of sanitation to the Millennium Development Goals at the World Summit for Sustainable Development in 2002 (MDG 7 target 10). Looking to the future, the global WASH campaign will continue to promote the importance of the three components in achieving global health and spurring economic and social development.

Today, the campaign has grown into a worldwide movement with the support of many governments, NGOs and partners. Individual and local WASH campaign activities have been set up in more than 30 countries with WASH now embodying a global concept understood and promoted by all sector stakeholders. Indeed, the Collaborative Council encourages other organizations to take up the WASH concept through periodic global and national level WASH campaigns and events, designed to take the WASH message from sector professionals to policy makers.

• Advocacy on the water supply side is directed towards the important role of water in ensuring improved health and poverty alleviation, water quality improvement at the domestic level, and the key role it plays in the water-sanitation-hygiene trinity.
• Advocacy for hygiene and sanitation focuses respectively on changes in behavior at the household level and waste management in the immediate environment and at community level.

Specifically, the WASH campaign emphasizes the importance of safe water supply, adequate sanitation and hygiene interventions to:

• Reduce child mortality rates,
• Improve dignity and privacy of human beings, especially women and girls,
• Lessen the economic burden of disease, both in direct costs and in time lost,
• Promote development and reduce poverty.

 "WASH has helped to place the issues of clean water, basic sanitation and good hygiene firmly in the public consciousness and on the political agenda. The United Nations supports the principles behind the campaign in the hope that one day the world will no longer have to face the dire consequences of inadequate access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation" Kofi Annan, former United Nations Secretary General, at the occasion of the Global WASH Forum, Dakar, Senegal, 2004.

Advocacy materials intended to support WASH advocacy initiatives at global and at country levels can be found here.