Water, Sanitation and Hygiene

Many more – experts suggest around 2.6 billion people worldwide – live without access to basic sanitation facilities. Six thousand children die every single day from water-related illnesses, and over three million people die every year as a result of poor or non-existent water and sanitation facilities.

Making poverty history

Water plays a key role in the struggle to fight poverty, promote girls’ education, ease the burden on women, secure food production, provide healthcare and prevent conflict, and is therefore a key thematic area for Norwegian Church Aid’s activities around the world. We have many decades of experience within this sector, and today support 129 projects in 39 countries worldwide that work to ensure that people’s basic human right to water and sanitation is respected and fulfilled.

Norwegian Church Aid’s long-term water and sanitation projects fall into four main categories:

• Projects to provide or improve water and sanitation conditions and hygiene knowledge in poor communities by for example drilling wells, installing water pumps, protecting springs, building latrines, introducing waste management techniques, carrying out hygiene promotion activities, etc
• Water for livelihood projects help people to make better use of available water resources to produce food or generate income. Methods include rainwater harvesting, the construction of water catchments along small rivers to provide water for agricultural use, improving water storage systems, irrigation projects and more 
• Advocacy work to lobby local and national authorities to give plan and budget priority to providing clean water and safe sanitation for all citizens
• Other projects that include a water- or sanitation-related element ( such as school building, often for girls; infrastructure improvement; health centre construction etc)

When disaster strikes, water sources are often damaged or destroyed beyond use. Yet clean water is a primary requirement when dealing with large numbers of displaced, injured or sick people. Norwegian Church Aid has many years of experience in deploying water treatment systems and sanitation equipment at very short notice to areas affected by disaster, such as in Southeast Asia following the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, or cyclone Sidr in Bangladesh in 2007. You can read more about how we respond to emergency situations here.

Norwegian Church Aid recognises that long-term change can only be created if politicians and decision-making bodies around the world agree to make changes to legislation to promote human rights and support the poor and disadvantaged. Read more about Norwegian Church Aid’s work to influence decision making bodies on the right to water and other issues related to water and sanitation here.