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The success in achieving the Millennium Development Goals’ (MDGs) water target and massive growth in water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) programmes have masked a little-discussed secret: WASH interventions frequently fail.
Rather than focusing on what is almost literally pouring money down the drain, donor reports and NGO websites prefer instead to boast of the numbers of water pumps drilled or toilets installed.
“You don’t take photos at a funeral,” said Dutch water expert George De Gooijer, who is based at the Netherlands’ embassy in Benin. “The lack of a link between results on the ground and the proposals is the one that needs to be solved.”
The first year of the ‘Decade of Action,’ a call by world leaders to accelerate efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, coincided with the outbreak of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic. With more than 2.5 million people succumbing to the virus so far, and possibly a lasting devastating socioeconomic impact, it has become even more imperative that the 2030 Agenda is prioritised by nations worldwide. The SDGs, a broader and more transformative version of the Millennium Development Goal (MDGs), were adopted in 2015 to address the issues plaguing the three dimensions of development: Economic growth, social development and environment sustainability. The 17 global goals were devised in a holistic manner in order to be inclusive, empowering, and gender-sensitive. What differentiated the SDGs from their previous incarnation was the global commitment to achieving visible gender equality, integrated and ingrained into all the SDGs apart from the standalone Goal 5.