General

AfricaSan is now five! And we are learning fast

This blog was jointly produced by John Butterworth (IRC Ethiopia Country Director) and Nick Dickinson (IRC Associate / WASHNote). It was posted on IRCWASH.org.

AfricaSan5 just like a five-year old, reflects a sanitation and hygiene sector that is nowhere near mature, but is growing up fast and is full of ambition. And when you get to five, we know you have a good chance of going all the way in life and achieving great things. We need to grow up quickly to answer the call in the Camissa Statement, where the conference stakeholders “call upon Heads of State of the Africa Union to declare an Africa-wide state of emergency on sanitation and hygiene and to be sanitation and hygiene champions in their respective countries.”

Sanitation dialogues between more than 35 African countries

This year more than 35 countries are reporting on the African sanitation commitments established with the Ngor Declaration. As an IRC associate, in partnership with UNICEF, I have worked with the AMCOW secretariate and partners to establish a new monitoring systems for the Ngor Declaration Commitments, pilot the system in Kenya, Nigeria, and Senegal and finally support the baseline monitoring exercise.

IRC has been working with AMCOW and UNICEF in this process since 2016 to design and validate the indicators with African countries for each of the Ngor Commitments. My colleauge Alana Potter wrote about our reflections on the needs of the monitoring system based on the monitoring of eThekwini Declaration.

Soon sub-regional meetings will take place for countries to exchange with peers on their sanitation commitments and the actions they are taking to strengthen the enabling environment for sustainable sanitation in their country. We are now checking each country report, generating report cards and identifying focus areas and mutual strengths among country peers. This should lead into an exciting country dialogue process and culminate this monitoring round next year in February 2019 at the AfricaSan 5 conference.

WASHNote