A clear understanding of the rules of the game, and who does what is essential for any team effort. In many countries, the absence of a coherent policy framework and clear roles and responsibilities for sanitation and hygiene promotion hampers efforts to achieve significant progress and scaling up.
Poorly defined institutional responsibilities are often reflected in the national budget, which rarely has a single clear line-item associated with sanitation. Without such a budget line there is little incentive for the many ‘interested’ ministries to prioritize sanitation. In practice, sanitation and hygiene promotion are often handled by small marginal departments within a number of ministries (water, health, education, local government) and thus lack a significan high-level champion.
For sanitation and hygiene promotion to happen they need to be embedded in an institutional framework which consists of
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Policy (to drive change);
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Finance (to fund change);
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Organizations (to implement and regulate change); and
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A view of development which see sanitation and hygiene as key elements in a national drive towards poverty reduction, equity and growth.
In the absence of any of these elements, efforts will remain piecemeal and will be hard to deliver at scale.
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