New handbook on sustainable water and sanitation

A useful new handbook about water use/conservation, hygiene and sanitation has been produced by ARC's Dutch partner agencies Aqua For All and the Environmental Management Foundation (EMF). The book, entitled WASH solutions for schools has been compiled in line with the World Health Organisation's Water, Sanitation and Health (WASH) programme. WASH is a contribution to meeting UN Millennium Development Goal target 7.C to 'halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation'.

Aimed at teachers and those with responsibility for managing faith schools in the developing world the handbook offers practical, step-by-step advice intended to help them assess their needs in relation to water and decide on the best methods for meeting them. The advantages and disadvantages (including costs) of a wide variety of options for sourcing, storing and treating water and strategies for sanitation are discussed to help inform the planning stages.

EMF and ARC have been working together on this issue for some time, recognising that poor quality water and sanitation can literally be a matter of life or death: in the developing world diarrhoea kills more children than AIDS, malaria and measles combined. In 2009 Faith, Schools and Water an ARC-organised workshop of religious leaders and experts initiated the Water Schools initiative, aiming to use the immense reach of the worldwide faith schools network to educate children about hygiene and sanitation and to demonstrate the effective and sustainable use of water to their community. Some impressive results have been achieved already as was demonstrated during a seven-day Education for Sustainable Development workshop held in Nairobi in February 2012, where schools from across sub-Saharan Africa shared simple techniques for purifying drinking water.

	Around the world 884 million people do not have access to safe drinking water

The free handbook will be available as a downloadable pdf document through the ARC, EMF and Water Schools websites.

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