It’s time for a better future!
On the opening day of SACOSAN VI, the largest gathering of sanitation and hygiene experts in South Asia, the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC) and the Freshwater Action Network South Asia (FANSA) released a critically important and ground breaking new report.
Entitled ‘Leave No One Behind: Voices of Women, Adolescent Girls, Elderly, Persons with Disabilities and Sanitation Workforce’, this report examines the most vulnerable and marginalised populations in South Asia, highlighting the plight of the voiceless and under-served populations, and the dire need to ensure access to safe, satisfactory sanitation and hygiene for all. Investigating the needs of these groups across eight South Asian countries, the report explores the hopes and aspirations of thousands of men and women, in a region where over a billion people face the daily reality of life without safe sanitation.
“This report, and the consultations which led to it, is a clarion call to ‘listen and learn’ by putting people at the centre and valuing individual and different needs in addition to those of whole communities,” said Archana Patkar, Programme Manager at WSSCC. “It is a call also to ‘see and recognise’ the unseen and to ‘make visible’ the invisible … putting human faces and names to sanitation workers, waste pickers who empty out pits, clean drains, sweep streets and segregate our waste.”
The report launch was held at SACOSAN in order to use the conference as an important platform to highlight the need for governments to renew their commitments to ensuring a better life for all in South Asia. Under the banner ‘Better Sanitation, Better Life’ the three-day conference held in Dhaka, Bangladesh from 11 to 13 January 2016, aims to accelerate progress on sanitation and hygiene promotion in South Asia, and thus enhance the quality of people’s lives.
Read the full press release from the report launch, and download the full report online.
