Sanitation and Water for all (SWA) partners have collected deeply alarming stories about rural communities in Tanzania, including children going to school without any water, a year’s worth of crops destroyed, and an 8km hike just to fetch a bucket of dirty water from a pond.
Sadly, we have heard these stories before. The overwhelming feelings one gets from reading these Tanzania stories is the desperation and the feeling that these people have no hope. We know it does not have to be this way. But these people don’t have time to wait for snail-paced policy development – they need action now.
In Tanzania and other countries, there is an urgent need to focus on policy – integrating water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) into climate planning policies and advocating for WASH adaptation needs and mitigation opportunities. This shows why SWA’s Priority Focus for 2021 on climate change is absolutely right - but we need to focus on both quick wins, as well as longer term objectives.
But it is also very encouraging that the SWA wants to accelerate the exchange of knowledge and support capacity building around climate change adaptation –for this, we should act right now.
There are a number of huge opportunities this year to really demonstrate the ready-made solutions and how they can be replicated. We cannot let these opportunities go by; or worse, just use them to highlight the already well-documented problems..
So what should the SWA do right now? AquaFed and the CSO Media for Community Empowerment (MACS), who joined forces to raise the voices of the communities in Tanzania, suggest the following:
- Use the SWA platform to connect innovators and entrepreneurs with solutions such as small water reuse or non-flush toilets with SWA country partners – the SWA Private Sector constituency has so much expertise that is still untapped.
- Enable the SWA CSO partners to share stories of how partnerships have already found solutions and let’s try to replicate them. Essentially, let’s not re-invent the wheels or worse, talk about re-inventing them.
- Bring financial investors to the SWA work on climate change, particularly investors willing to take more risk eg Venture Capital or angel investors. Let’s understand what climate change solutions they would or would not be prepared in and why.
These are all quick wins. Not difficult to achieve. And very necessary. The SWA has the unrivalled convening power and ability to make these happen. The partners are ready, so what are we waiting for?
The SWA framework, especially the Mutual Accountability Mechanism (MAM), has the potential to facilitate all the points above. And all partners can potentially help with taking action on these points.
AquaFed and MACS hope that SWA partners will work with us to use the SWA as a platform for the work highlighted above and to achieve some very tangible achievements this year.
The communities in Tanzania are waiting for us.