DAY4 - Thursday 24th of March

Achieving water security means ensuring a minimum water supply for human and economic needs. Being this as one of the main short-term objectives in the world, the impacts of climate change and the degradation of natural water sources make water security an insurmountable challenge in the medium and long term.

The Session intends to reflect on the role of international cooperation to the achievement of SDG6 taking into consideration concrete projects existing in Portuguese speaking countries. This session will address the technical, social, environmental, and regulatory perspectives of these countries, with a view to achieving the SDGs, in particular the SDG6.

Having access to safe drinking water and sanitation is central to living a life in dignity and upholding human rights. Yet billions of people still do not enjoy these fundamental rights.

The primary focus of the session will be to present AfWA with focus on its contribution to empower African private and public WASH operators for better achieving the SDG 6. This session would allow AfWA to showcase of its strategy to scale up programs for high impact in accelerating access to water and sanitation services in Africa.

Non-sewered sanitation is largely predominant in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2020, this sanitation method, often managed informally, represented 72% of the access in rural areas and 78.6% in urban areas. Therefore, formalizing non-sewered sanitation should be considered as a key issue for local authorities, which are usually responsible for this service.

Water professionals increasingly need to address pollution by chemicals of emerging concern’s (CECs), including low dose and mixtures effects on early indicators of toxic pathway, which cannot be evaluated by traditional substance-based analytical methods.

The impact of the environment on the health of individuals and communities is profound. Nowhere is this reality felt as strongly as on the African continent, where a large proportion of diseases are determined by environmental factors, and where the living conditions of communities (habitat, food, transport) make them extremely vulnerable to changes in the environment and climate.

OSH Forum is an international and collective initiative that aims to produce tangible evidence based recommendations towards the operational implementation of an integrated One Sustainable Health approach. These recommendations will be made by the 6 International Working Groups and synthesized in a One Sustainable Health Declaration to be published during the World Health Summit 2022 October in Berlin. This declaration will provide guideline s for operational programmes and public policies for states, international agencies, companies, NGOs and foundations.

The objective of this session is twofold.

The first objective is to highlight the benefits of innovative partnerships for protecting, maintaining and/or strengthening water and sanitation services during crises with concrete examples of successful actions.

The second will be to encourage a dialogue between the public and a representative sample of the diversity of actors present in crises context, in order to collectively identify solutions to foster multi-stakeholder responses for the protection and maintenance of WASH services in crisis contexts.