Link between health and water is crucial for urban development

The linkage between urbanisation, water and health is not easily understood but it is critical to the development of local communities, said UN-Habitat’s Graham Alabaster at yesterday’s World Water Week in Stockholm, Sweden.

“Lots of smaller urban centres are going to grow in an unplanned way and the sprawl from these and the development of slums will be one of the symptoms of unplanned urbanisation,” said Alabaster, speaking at the session Water & Urban Development From A Health Perspective. “This will have a profound effect on health.  Communicable diseases relating to water like cholera will get worse in peri-urban areas and without proper planning and transport, there will be an increase in cardiovascular diseases and cancer related to air pollution. I hope the sectors are going to work more closely together. ”

One organisation that is seeking to develop cross-sector partnerships to bring together water and health issues is Conservation International, which has neatly summed up the need for integration as ‘Life does not happen in sectors’.

“When we talked to our development partners, the things people are really concerned about are basic services so three years ago, we started working with the WWF and began to reach out to WASH Advocates and World Vision to make links to see if there was common ground between us,”’ said Janet Edmond of Conservation International citing as an example of the integration of WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) and conservation, the Nosivolo Project in Madagascar.

Merri Weinger of USAID then gave a concrete example of how sectors overlap through a project in Bangladesh where “WASH, diarrhoea and undernutrition are inextricably linked”.

The project was part of the Alive And Thrive initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which aims to reduce stunting in children. In Bangladesh, 43 percent of children under five are stunted and Weinger said working with mothers there on handwashing and nutrition had identified interventions that could both reduce diarrhoea as well as nutrition. The project had targeted children between six and 24 months as this is the period where stunting occurs.

“The interventions were the promotion of handwashing stations with soap which are near food preparation and feeding areas as well as counselling and demonstration of feeding of food in the right quantities at the right frequency,” said Weinger. “While we have no magic bullet, these are promising examples of water inclusive interventions which can reduce malnutrition and diarrhoea.”