Stockholm World Water Week 2015

Seminar: Moving forward: complementarity of humanitarian and development WASH approaches in protracted crisis

The German WASH Network and the German Federal Foreign Office together with UNICEF, the Sustainable Sanitation Alliance (SuSanA), the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs Switzerland (FDFA) and ECHO jointly convene a seminar titled “Moving forward: complementarity of humanitarian and development WASH approaches in protracted crisis” at World Water Week 2015. The seminar seeks to improve cooperation and coordination between humanitarian WASH actors and their development counterparts. Increasingly, both groups are providing WASH assistance in contexts of protracted crisis (e.g. Iraq, Jordan or Chad). Discussions are ongoing at field and headquarter level, how these interventions connect. Stockholm offers the ideal venue for continuous dialogue between WASH development and humanitarian actors to identify comparative advantages and improve connectedness to ensure more effective, efficient and better coordinated WASH service delivery. During last year’s seminar humanitarian WASH actors agreed to use Stockholm as platform for coordination and discussions on humanitarian WASH issues. The seminar will also be used to identify key WASH issues that should feed into the World Humanitarian Summit process. Referring to the overall “water and development” theme the connectedness between WASH humanitarian assistance and development aid will be at the core of the session using an interactive world café format. The conveners will stimulate discussion on the two assistance types with regard to their differing roles, principles, objectives and limitations. Such mutual understanding on the distinctive roles of both assistance types is seen essential to identify most reasonable and effective linkages along the humanitarian and development aid interface. Identify, then connect!