Yesterday I listened in on a webinar give by Andrew Trevett – Senior Adviser, Water, Sanitation and Hygiene, UNICEF, and Rolf Luyendijk, Senior Statistics and Monitoring Specialist, Water, Sanitation and Hygiene, UNICEF.  The webinar talked about WASH and equity, focusing primarily on rural populations vs urban and was based off of a WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) report on drinking water.  This presentation was talking mainly from a monitoring standpoint so it’s mainly a look at statistics gathered over the past 10 years.  They had a lot of interesting things to show us and so I thought I’d post it so everyone can take a look.  This is mainly going to be charts with a little commentary, but if you have any questions let me know and maybe I can answer them.

They started out by listing what inequility can result from: spatial (geography, urban/rural, etc), wealth, gender, religion/caste/ethnicity/language, education, disability, and stigma (disease, etc). Then we moved into our first slide, which is seen below.  This slide aims to show that when you see an average for something like, in this case, water coverage there is a lot behind that number that you’re not seeing.  Lets walk through this slide starting in the second column with Sub-Saharan Africa.  You see that the water coverage in Sub-Saharan Africa is 61%, but lets look deeper.  You have a number of countries listed, but they focus on Sierra Leone which has 55% coverage.  When you break that number down between urban and rural you see that 87% of the urban area has drinking water coverage, where only 35% of the rural areas have it.  In the urban areas 97% of the richest 20% are covered where only 56% of the poorest 20% are covered.  When you move to rural you see only 59% of the richest 20% are covered and only 10% of the poorest 20% are covered!  

This second slide is pretty basic.  It’s just showing some of the differences between rural (dark colors) and urban as far as WASH.  Rolf said he likes to show slides like this because it shows, in a way, that the rural populations are being left behind because there’s a big push to get water and sanitation up to par in urban areas.

This third graph shows the changes in access in sub-Saharan Africa comparing low-income non-fragile countries and middle income countries.  The low-income non-fragile countries include places like Mali, Burkina Faso and Ghana, and the middle income countries include places like Morocco, South Africa, and most of North Africa.  There’s a lot going on in this slide, but there is a couple of things that i’d like to point out.  If you look at the middle-income countries you see that there has been less progress in improved drinking water sources then in low-income countries.  Another interesting point to look at is that the percentage of piped water in rural areas has skyrocketed.  Now, looking at this and seeing that improved drinking water really hasn’t gone up a lot, but piped water in rural areas has tells me that they have been doing a lot of upgrades to improved water sources and piping these sources in rural areas.  Is this what the government should be spending money on?  Or should the work to get everyone a basic improved water source before piping to peoples houses?

This is another simple but interesting graph showing coverage in Lao in different areas.

The next three graphs deal with sanitation and are based on either income or location (urban vs rural).  As you can see in the first graph which is showing figures from India the poorest 40-60% are really not making much progress at all.  This is also shown in the second graph, which is an expanded version of the first but broken up between urban and rural.  The third graph shows four different types of patterns that are typically seen in their study.  Looking at Bangladesh you can see that they are making a lot of improvement across the board.

That’s it for today, but i’ll be adding the other half tomorrow so if you liked this first part then come back tomorrow.  Thanks for reading.