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Prioritising Water, Sanitation and Hygiene in Ebola Recovery: For health, life and dignity

Attachments

Key messages

  • The benefits of water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) are clear and well understood; improved WASH has direct impacts on health, education, dignity and gender equality, and therefore has impacts on long-term development and prosperity.
  • Yet the reality is that the Ebola-affected countries have some of the worst WASH coverage in the world. And this has had fatal impacts: poor WASH has limited infection prevention and control and exacerbated the impact and reach of the Ebola outbreak.
  • The recovery process needs to radically strengthen public health services, and WASH must be a crucial part of that. This clearly requires a focus on WASH in health centres.
  • WASH improvements are also needed in schools, slums and more broadly in communities.
  • Improvements must go beyond WASH hardware into clear plans for effective community-led engagement, involvement them in managing services and so ensuring sustainability.
  • Communities must be equipped to hold WASH providers accountable for service provision

This paper provides specific recommendations for the Ebola Recovery Pledging Conference, July 2015.