Water and Sanitation Services
“Water and Health, Tomorrow’s Wealth”
Ensuring people have access to a reliable supply of clean water and proper sanitation is vital to a nation’s health. The main role of SOPAC’s Water and Sanitation Services Component is to support Pacific island governments and water and wastewater service providers achieve this.
Water Quality Monitoring
The Water Quality Monitoring programme helps build national capacity to monitor the quality of drinking water, surface water, ground water and coastal waters. Countries are provided with basic water testing equipment and in-country training on best laboratory practice. In addition an electronic water quality database has been developed to assist countries better manage and analyse water quality data and link results to a regional back-up database.
Drinking Water Safety Planning
The Drinking Water Safety Planning Programme promotes a risk management approach for the provision of safe water supplies through collaboration between water utilities, regulators and resource managers. The programme supports the country efforts to implement system specific improvements for urban and rural water supplies and supports the involvement of communities in water safety awareness and advocacy.
Water Demand Management
The Water Demand Management Programme seeks to improve the capacity of Pacific urban water utilities to deal with unaccounted-for-water. In-country support is being provided to establish System Loss Management Plans and assist countries acquire both “hardware”, such as water meters, leak detection equipment or bulk water-saving devices for incentive or rebate schemes, and “software”, which includes training, community education materials and technical expertise.
Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene
The Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) programme promotes the use of appropriate technologies and approaches for domestic water supply and sanitation issues through awareness raising, demonstrating best practices and advocacy. This includes rainwater harvesting and mainstreaming gender and community participation in water supply and sanitation. Increasing interest and support by donors and other organisations on the critical issue of water and sanitation has resulted in a large number of overlapping interventions. Ensuring that work carried out is well coordinated, in order to optimise outputs and avoid duplication, has therefore become increasingly important. Partners have been mobilised to coordinate activities through the Pacific WASH Coalition, including coordinated responses in times of natural disasters through the Pacific Humanitarian Team.