WASH as one piece of a larger sustainability puzzle: A case study on development solutions in rural Colombia

It’s not every day that I find myself visiting a primary school in the dusty savannah of La Guajira, Colombia, being neither a teacher nor Colombian – but there we were. Shortly after being deployed to La Guajira through my work in a sustainable development NGO, I joined my colleagues in determining the scope of work to provide access to water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) in this school. At the time of our visit, the school was serving approximately 150 students, and operated without water or bathrooms.

On that particular day, we met with the school’s only two teachers. Due to lack of funding, these two teachers were the school’s entire staff, and thus also served as principals, janitors, and administrators. Although its six classrooms all appeared structurally intact, the rooftop of the onsite kitchen had previously caved in, leaving the space open and exposed. Some ancient bathrooms, installed long ago, contained broken toilets and were being used as storage space for building materials. The lack of water access anywhere on the school compound meant that students needed to leave school to drink water or use the bathroom—or they went to the bathroom outdoors, which has major environmental and human health risks.

At 10 a.m., the compound was mostly vacant, save for our small group and the occasional goat passing through; the children had been sent home already. Without government programming in place to ensure at least one meal a day for the students, by late morning many children were hungry and could not focus—this meal would have been, for some, the only guaranteed meal of the day.

We spent the meeting discussing priorities with the two teachers, the scope of the infrastructure interventions and trainings that we could provide, and next steps. With the limited and restricted funds of an NGO focused on providing access to WASH, we could still do quite a lot. Our work plan included repairing parts of the community water system, providing piped water in the school, constructing new bathrooms, handwashing facilities, and drinking water taps, installing a water filter so children and staff have access to safe drinking water, and providing training for staff on the management and maintenance of the infrastructure, as well as innovative educational sessions with students on good hygiene practices. These trainings go a particularly long way in improving health outcomes in communities such as this one—having access to water only goes so far when users don’t practice improved hygiene, and oftentimes the shift from using “nature’s bathroom” to a toilet and handwashing facilities is a substantial cultural and habitual gap to bridge. This is the focus of our work in Colombia, and in general the work that I’ve been involved in for the past year and a half: advancing sustainable development with a focus on providing access to WASH.

The visit left me with a complexity of thoughts and feelings. On the one hand, it is fulfilling and important to be participating in this work as I was and am. There are drastic and myriad health and quality of life improvements that come from having access to WASH. It’s a human right, yet one that is easy to forget when you come from a place that has seemingly unlimited access to water. I also have a great respect for the work and approach of the NGO, which is focused on truly impacting the underlying systems that created unsuitable WASH conditions in the first place. These include working directly with governments, rooting interventions in sound science and evidence-based approaches, reflection and learning from past mistakes and successes, and centering community knowledge, tradition, and experience throughout the project design and implementation processes.

At the same time, visiting this school and listening to the perspectives and needs of the teachers left me with some discomfort and sadness. There is such a broad cross-section of needs in this school, and a great complexity of underlying factors that leave those needs unmet. The issues don’t start and stop with water, although water is a great beginning. Other elements, such as food security, government accountability, access to reliable and quality infrastructure, economic opportunities, climate change, and more, all come together to impact the learning environment in this school. These factors and more, by extension, will dictate quality of life and outcomes among the students, now and later in life.

Our work in this school will likely be finite, with our presence guaranteed really only for the life of a grant. With additional funding, perhaps we could provide further trainings, or implement other projects in the school that touch on other elements under the WASH umbrella. If we were to work in neighboring communities or schools, some very dedicated colleagues might pass by and provide occasional follow-up support, as needed. But the mission of the organization to focus specifically on WASH, and the influence of donors focused on building new, or reaching more, does not lend itself to working long-term in a single community.

If through a WASH intervention, we can have a meaningful and long-term impact on this community’s heath and wellbeing, what would it look like if we could work with this community to address the other challenges present, as well? If the development interventions could also address issues of food security, governance, economic development, access to resources, climate change, and more? If, instead of selecting one issue or addressing one problem, we worked on many, or all, at once? Because what is water without food, food without quality education, and education without job prospects? And so on.

Ultimately, this integrated approach is how I believe we must work, on a societal level, in order to truly advance sustainability. I believe in the importance of addressing access to WASH, as one puzzle piece of a larger development puzzle. But ideally, in addition to addressing access to WASH, one would be able to simultaneously work on other sustainability issues present, because in communities such as this one and throughout the world, unfavorable conditions are multi-faceted, and thus require multi-faceted solutions.

While one NGO can’t always solve every problem, there is room to collaborate and build consortiums and share resources to achieve a common goal. Project design provides an opportunity to consider the myriad root causes that create unfavorable conditions, and from there determine intervention pathways that would improve conditions, across different sectors and issues, drawing in different resources and actors who can contribute. After all, sustainable development work is fundamentally about improving wellbeing and enabling everyone to live a dignified life, while preserving and nurturing this planet, our home. With this, a question to all involved in the sustainability space: is our work systemic enough to truly achieve our common goal?