Actions for water & sanitation policy development

Actions for Water and Sanitation Policy Development

HIP’s mandate is to work at scale.As part of the effort to measure progress in achieving scale in different country programs, HIP is developing a hygiene improvement effort index.This index follows the Hygiene Improvement Framework, which includes enabling environment as one of its three components.One aspect of enabling environment is the extent to which appropriate water and sanitation policies are in place that favor hygiene improvement.Considerable work to date has defined aspects of policy required in the context of a given country.USAID’s Environmental Health project (EHP) developed Guidelines for the Assessment of Sanitation Policies by M. Elledge, F. Rosenweig and D. Warner that summarizes criteria to be used to determine the completeness of sanitation policies.Additional work has also been done by other authors regarding water policies. Of interest is the White Paper on Water Policy regarding South Africa’s Water Policy (www.polity.org/za/html/govdocs/white_papers/water.html).These documents have helped HIP develop a list of actions that must occur when developing policies that affect hygiene improvement, particularly water and sanitation policies.The list of policy aspects that must be considered when determining whether effective human consumption water and sanitation policies are in place appear below.