WASH: Considerations for Emergency Appeals and Response Plans

General issues

  1. Emergency response strategies, plans and appeals should refer to WASH (Water, Sanitation AND Hygiene) as comprehensive interventions and without omitting one of them.
  2. Adequate management and oversight of UNICEF’s emergency WASH programme might demand additional capacity and it is often under-estimated, especially in major emergencies. Response plan budgets should include WASH human resourcerequirements (both for technical and administrative support).
  3. WASH interventions should ensure that they do not create additional risks for the affected population (especially women and children), for example by making them walk long distances in insecure environments or locating sanitation facilities in isolated areas. Women and girls should be consulted in the design of WASH facilitates and their specific needs (such as for managing menstrual hygiene) need to be considered.
  4. The appeal/response plan must include adequate and appropriate monitoring mechanisms; and appropriate budget and capacities should be put in place to support these. Ensure that monitoring mechanisms are in line with the indicators and targets included in the funding proposals.Especially when access is limited, consider the additional costs of third party or external monitoring in the budget. If partners’ require capacity development for monitoring, this should also be included in the plan/budget.
  5. To the maximum extent possible, WASH interventions should reflect and include clear commitments to build and support national capacity and community participation to ensure sustainability and appropriate use of the interventions, as well as to avoid disempowering national structures and processes.
  6. WASH interventions for emergency response must include connectivity with the development programmes, promoting the incorporation of Disaster Risk Reduction measures and contributing to Early Recovery / Recovery.

Cluster/Sector Coordination

  1. Establishment of appropriate sectoral coordination is included under UNICEF’s commitments, though this does not necessarily imply activation of the IASC cluster approach or UNICEF taking the lead role.UNICEF’s role must be clearly defined and budgeted in the appeal/response plan, taking into account the specific national context.
  2. Supporting sectoral coordination might be done through different mechanisms, and not necessarily imply UNICEF building a coordination team on its own. Depending on the conditions on the ground, one option could be to support national coordination platforms via secondment of technical/coordination staff into national institutions to strength their capacity to deal with the coordination burden while maintaining the lead role.

Technical issues

  1. Beyond the specific WASH sectoral response, the effectiveness of other sectors’ response will be considerably affected by the presence (or absence) of a complementary WASH component (i.e. WASH in schools and temporary learning spaces, ECD centres, nutrition and therapeutic feeding centres, health and other medical treatment centres, CTCs, Child friendly Spaces, among others).Certain situations will require specific interaction with particular sectors (e.g. integrated response to an outbreak of acute watery diarrhoea). WASH therefore needs to proactively engage with other sectors to:
  2. identify where it can add value to their response plans and what level of support will be needed from the WASH section,
  3. identify how other sectorstechnical advice can improve WASH sectoral response (i.e. by the inclusion of cross-cutting issues into WASH specific interventions such as gender, age (including considerations for both elderly and early childhood interventions), disabilities, HIV/AIDS, protection considerations, etc.), and
  4. agree on what costs need to be included in the response plan budget/appeal (and under which section’s budget).
  5. Response plans for ensuring access to water are often heavily oriented on infrastructure or massive distribution of water, while including very little or nothing on household water treatment and storage (HWTS) or point of use (PoU) water treatment. A balance between both will be required to ensure people are actually accessing safe drinking.For the collected water to have the required quality before being consumed, and that quality is maintained in the household, supplies for HWTS (or PoU water treatment) should be provided, alongside appropriateinformation (and capacity) to ensure their proper use.
  6. Specific resources and activities should be included to monitor water quality, ensuring that the information collected is properly used to inform the response programme and leading to corrective measures as appropriate.
  7. On sanitation, first efforts should aim to ensure the living environment is free of human faeces by the provision of adequate facilities and means to ensure appropriate excreta disposal. This should include not only on-site sanitation but also final disposal of faeces.
  8. Together with sanitation facilities, complementary facilities for handwashing and personal hygiene (bathing and washing facilities, including laundry) must be provided. Facilities should include considerations to ensure privacy, security and dignity.
  9. UNICEF’s WASH interventions must include hygiene. Unfortunately, hygiene is not always properly addressed nor budgeted, and sometimes only included as distribution of hygiene kits. Hygiene activities should ensure people are aware of the risks related to inadequate WASH practices and should, as much as possible, use community-based approaches to promote behaviour change. Given the cross-sectoral nature of communication for behaviour change activities, coordination with other sectors is essential to identify opportunities for joint implementation and to ensure the best use of resources at all levels.
  10. Adequate and appropriate monitoring mechanisms need to be considered together with the programmatic implementation activities; therefore budget and capacities should be allocated accordingly. Ensure monitoring mechanisms are in line with the indicators and targets included in funding proposals, and that implementing partners have the same monitoring approach (progressively reporting on outcomes rather than only on inputs and activities). When access is limited, options as third party monitoring can be used, and consider the additional resources required for that.
  11. Other areas/type of interventions may appear as issues during the emergency with some tendency to be associated with the WASH sectoral appeal, such as solid or medical waste management, drainage, vector control, etc. Definition of UNICEF’s role in these areas needs to be defined in advance.