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with its traditional work among rural communities. During its Water and Environmental Sanitation Strategy Review Meeting in March 1995, UNICEF pledged to pay greater attention to sanitation in environmentally vulnerable urban areas. |
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1.3
Initiatives by Bilateral Aid Donors |
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Aid donors such as USAID, Overseas Development Administration (ODA), CIDA, DANIDA, SIDA, GTZ, DGIS of the Netherlands and SDC of Switzerland, and many others, have been well to the fore in both supporting UN and other international initiatives, and undertaking their own developmental assistance and research programmes for advancing the cause of urban sanitation. Two examples of donor programmes relevant to the main theme of this book are given below. |
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1.3.1
The USAID WASH Project |
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The WASH Project, which ran for 13 years before handing over to a wider-based environmental health project in 1993, is probably the premier activity within the sector. Among the many messages to be conveyed from the report Lessons Learned in Water, Sanitation and Health (WASH, 1993), I have selected the following: |
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In the past, sanitary engineers simply assumed that a certain number of people would generate a certain volume of waste and it was the engineer's job to design and build a system large enough to handle that volume. Today, engineers are more inclined to examine where the waste is coming from, why it is being generated and how the volume and toxicity can be reduced. Whereas waterborne collection systems were once taken for granted as the norm, people now look for means of disposal that use less water. |
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Tunisia, for example, with WASH assistance, developed and institutionalised a half dozen sanitation alternatives. Brazil has cut costs of urban sewers by 30 to 50 per cent by changing design norms of its sewer systems. |
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'Impossible situations' are more likely to be found in peri-urban communities, which are almost always built on cheap land with unattractive physical attributes, such as a steep slope or swampy conditions. |
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