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Health impact of water supply and sanitation projects in Northern Pakistan
conference contribution
posted on 2018-02-12, 15:11 authored by Tameez Ahmad, Karim AlibhaiIt is well established that lack of access to safe water,
inadequate sanitation, and poor hygiene practices are
responsible for the high prevalence of preventable diseases
in developing countries. According to WHO/UNICEF, 4
billion cases of diarrhoea are reported in the world every
year, with 2.2 million deaths annually, mostly among
children under five. However, it has always been a major
challenge to quantify the extent of impact of water,
sanitation, and hygiene education interventions due to
methodological complexities and confounding variables
(Briscoe, Feachem, and Rahman, 1985; Cairncross, 1990;
Esrey et al., 1991; Gorter and Sandiford, 1997). Major
methodological flaws identified included the problems of
(i) comparability of treatment and control groups, (ii)
sample size required, (iii) misclassification bias, and (iv)
recall bias in ascertaining disease status amongst others.
Measurement of the impact of water, sanitation, and
hygiene interventions becomes even more difficult, when
implementing agencies set objectives/targets based on health
impact e.g., reduction of water and sanitation related
diseases. These difficulties stem from lack of resources
both human and financial, operational difficulties, time
limitation, and inability in implementing proposed plans
due to factors falling beyond organisational control. The
Water and Sanitation Extension Programme (WASEP) of
the Aga Khan Planning and Building Service (AKPBS) is one
implementing agency in Pakistan whose major objective is
to reduce diarrhoeal diseases. WASEP has been
implementing water and sanitation projects in northern
Pakistan since 1998. This paper will describe how health
impact is being measured at WASEP, and share issues and
problems encountered in the process.
History
School
- Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering
Research Unit
- Water, Engineering and Development Centre (WEDC)
Published in
WEDC ConferenceCitation
AHMAD, T. and ALIBHAI, K., 2001. Health impact of water supply and sanitation projects in Northern Pakistan. IN: Scott, R. (ed). People and systems for water, sanitation and health: Proceedings of the 27th WEDC International Conference, Lusaka, Zambia, 20-24 August 2001, pp. 47-50.Publisher
© WEDC, Loughborough UniversityVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2001Notes
This is a conference paper.Other identifier
WEDC_ID:9842Language
- en
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