Water, Sanitation and Hygiene

Action contre la Faim’s integrated approach to hunger and malnutrition involves extending water and sanitation services to communities faced with water scarcity, unsafe drinking water, inadequate sanitation, and poor hygiene.

A community’s health and well-being require a lasting supply of clean water and the knowledge of how to use and care for it properly. Unfortunately, an estimated 1.1 billion people lack access to clean water while a staggering 2.6 billion (42% of humanity) lack basic sanitation. This results in some 2.2 million deaths each year, mostly among children—deaths that are perfectly preventable through proven, cost-effective measures.

Action contre la Faim has developed its water and sanitation expertise over three decades of field work, advancing a number of solutions for populations at risk from water insecurity. We truck water into affected communities during emergencies, decontaminate wells and install hand-pumps. Employing sophisticated geophysics, we are able to locate water resources and tap aquifers. We protect natural springs and pipe water into villages and health centers. And we rehabilitate damaged infrastructure to ensure access to adequate sources of clean water. Our ability to deliver clean water is central to our comprehensive solutions to hunger and malnutrition.

How We Provide Access to Safe Water

A primary concern of ACF projects is to facilitate the provision of, and access to, safe drinking water. We do this by:

• Trucking water during emergencies until permanent sources can be established
• Cleaning contaminated water sources
• Installing water storage tanks and above-ground reservoirs
• Drilling new wells (that require buckets) and boreholes (that require pumps)
• Tapping and preserving springs
• Improving and installing local sanitation systems, including drainage networks and latrines
• Improving and installing irrigation systems
• Creating hygienic bathing facilities where infrastructure has been damaged by natural disaster or warfare.

Prioritizing Sanitation, Health, and Hygiene

Sanitation, health, and hygiene programs are of equal importance. Entire communities can become ill if hygiene is neglected. Outbreaks of cholera and dysentery, for example, frequently attack communities that drink and wash with contaminated water—infectious diseases that lead to excessive diarrhea, dehydration, and complicate malnutrition. In response, Action contre la Faim builds latrines and bathhouses and introduces basic sanitation infrastructure to keep communities hygienic. As a recent UN report laments: “That 2.6 billion people around the world are forced to defecate in plastic bags, buckets, open pits, agricultural fields, and public areas in their communities should generate a collective outcry for immediate, concerted efforts to expand access to improved sanitation facilities.” Action contre la Faim’s lifesaving programs ensure that communities benefit from improvements in sanitation, health, and hygiene.

Sustainable Programs: Extending Lasting Solutions

Our programs’ long-term benefits, however, would be hard to sustain without our painstaking commitment to community participation. Developing and extending water and sanitation services involves much more than quick technical fixes. To sustain water and sanitation improvements, a community-centered approach is central to building local capacity and harnessing a population’s participation, sense of ownership, energy and resources. By organizing and training community-based water committees, we ensure local commitment to managing and maintaining the systems we rehabilitate and install. In our campaign to vanquish hunger, clean water is as essential as food, but only the cultivation of local know-how can ensure its sustainability.

While the scale of global need is truly daunting, we know how to extend water and sanitation improvements, how to instill better hygiene practices, and how to teach populations to manage these resources themselves. Action contre la Faim’s programs alone reach four million people each year; reinforcing these efforts is one way to improve conditions for vulnerable communities around the world—populations whose lack of water leaves them vulnerable to daily indignities and appalling rates of death and debilitation.