Yes / The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic coincides with the tenth anniversary of the recognition of the rights to water and sanitation within the United Nations system. Although water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) remain critical for COVID-19 infection prevention and control, billions of people around the world lack access to basic WASH services in different spheres of life. Mostly affected are people living in vulnerable situations. While the pandemic has significantly impacted regulatory practices and access, key actors in the WASH sector continue to adopt diverse approaches to ensure safety, continuity, and reliability of supply. This chapter explores how COVID-19 influences WASH services and how the rights to water and sanitation can ultimately strengthen resilience to health pandemics? It makes recommendations from the perspective of inclusive development theory, for strengthening WASH sector governance towards ensuring the progressive realization of the rights to water and sanitation during and post the COVID-19 pandemic. Experiences with the coronavirus pandemic illustrate the crucial importance of access to water and sanitation as basic human rights and as necessities for the realization of health, education, food, gender equality, and other human rights (United Nations 2020). Emergent issues, particularly include the high public health risks associated with lack of water and sanitation and the disproportionate burden borne by women and girls, transgendered people, people living in informal settlements, people living with disabilities, the urban poor, migrant workers, workers in the informal sector, people who are sick or living with underlying health conditions, the elderly, school-aged children, and other groups living in vulnerable situations (Banerji 2020; Tan 2020; UNESCO n.d.). These highlight intersecting layers of inequalities in different situations of vulnerability and the interconnectedness of human rights. The pandemic has also demonstrated the imperative of leaving no one behind and ensuring universal access to water and sanitation to achieve sustainable development. From Africa to the Pan-European region, it is a similar picture: there are remarkable inequities in access to water and sanitation based on whether people live in urban or rural areas, whether people are rich or poor, and whether they have any special circumstances which render them vulnerable (Local Burden of Disease WaSH Collaborators 2020; Wang et al. 2019; World Health Organization & UN-Water 2019; United Nations 2020). Furthermore, because of the pandemic, several assumptions and modes of service delivery need to be reexamined to ensure continued suitability for promoting universal access to water and sanitation. It is in light of these realizations that this chapter examines the question: How has COVID-19 influenced water, sanitation and hygiene services and how can the rights to water and sanitation strengthen resilience in health pandemics? This question is addressed from the perspective of inclusive development theory which emphasizes the need to address the social, relational, and ecological aspects of human development (Gupta, Pouw, & Ros-Tonen 2015).
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BRADFORD/oai:bradscholars.brad.ac.uk:10454/19645 |
| Date | 07 October 2023 |
| Creators | Obani, Pedi |
| Publisher | Routledge |
| Source Sets | Bradford Scholars |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book chapter, Accepted manuscript |
| Rights | (c) 2021 Routledge. Full-text produced in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy., Unspecified |
| Relation | https://www.routledge.com/COVID-19-and-Human-Rights/Kjaerum-Davis-Lyons/p/book/9780367688035# |
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