Improving WASH governance through advocacy: lessons learned from Afghanistan

Advocacy is an important tool, as it lays a foundation for sustainable change, with its impact at the highest level being the influencing and change of unfavorable or out-dated government policies, legal and regulatory frameworks. This paper illustrates how advocacy can be used in Water Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) programming in post-conflict recovery to enhance good governance in the WASH sector. In this practice, the engagement of government at national and local level directly and through networks as well as the engagement of the community and strengthening of advocacy work at the grass root level is strong. In this case study, the inclusion of advocacy in Tearfund’s WASH programming, led to inclusion of Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) and Household Water Treatment (Biosand filters) as possible interventions during the revision of the Afghan National WASH Policy.