More Benefits for Households from Water and Sanitation through Intersectoral Synergies

The 22nd AGUASAN workshop dealt with the topic "More Benefits for Households from Water and Sanitation through Intersectoral Synergies" and explored the potential of a "Cross-Sector Approach", linking water and sanitation with health and income generation interventions, for having greater impact on the people’s livelihoods and on poverty alleviation. From the angle of vision of a water and sanitation (W&S) sector professional, the cross-sector approach (CSA) was understood as going beyond one’s core business and looking farther behind sector boundaries in search for genuinely joining forces with other sectors and realizing multiple benefits to households and increased impact from synergetic and combined approaches.

Various topic cases linking effectively W&S with environmental health aspects and income gen-eration opportunities were presented and assessed, and the learnings and insights transferred to the personal working situations of some participants in working group sessions. The outcomes of the various sessions resulted in a documentation of expected and perceived benefits from water and sanitation interventions as well as in strategic and practical recommendations about how making the CSA happen.

Water and sanitation sector professionals are the initiators and catalysers for such a cross-sector approach, but they are advised to stay with their core business without attempting to become an expert in the related fields. Rather they seek to link their competencies, their own interventions, their specific concepts and approaches with the expertise, activities and re-sources in the other complementary sectors for a genuine multi-actor and multi-sector cooperation mutually beneficial for all parties involved, based on shared roles and responsibilities in a commonly agreed on plan of action and evolving in a climate of trust and confidence.