For over a decade, UNICEF has supported an ambitious reform agenda that goes beyond building infrastructure and tackles several dimensions of the WASH enabling environment. These efforts to support governments, from the policies to financing, institutional arrangements, monitoring and capacity both at local and national levels, are critical to ensure scalability and sustainability of any progress made in service delivery at the local level. In many countries, support for these key governance functions has unlocked progress and ensured that the necessary supporting institutions, skills, financial flows and accountability mechanisms are in place to sustain progress made in WASH service delivery.
Despite improvements, global progress in the enabling environment has been slow, especially for sanitation. Increasing evidence shows that investments to strengthen key functions of the WASH enabling environment will not be enough unless the underlying causes of WASH failure are tackled directly. Such systemic bottlenecks that undermine the resilience, sustainability, scalability and inclusiveness of WASH include discrimination, climate and environmental disruption and sociopolitical fragility. These are structural, contextual and political factors that lie outside the traditional sphere of WASH competence, but they are already part of everyday UNICEF WASH programming, and they are at the heart of UNICEF WASH strategy 2016–2030. Future work to strengthen WASH systems will need to build on actions that stakeholders have already undertaken outside the traditional sphere of WASH activities to ‘Leave no One Behind’, to increase climate-resilient WASH, and through WASH for Peace initiatives, for example.
Building on this rich evidence base, the framework outlined in this document defines WASH systems strengthening as the work done to simultaneouslyreinforce the key functions of the WASH enabling environment, increase their interrelations, and minimize negative impacts of the broader environment on the WASH sector while leveraging opportunities to accelerate progress.
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