"Safe water and sanitation are essential to protect children's health and their ability to learn at school. In this sense, they are as vital as textbooks to a child's education.”

In light of UNICEF/IRC’s Call to Action in 2005, Water Advocates decided to make Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) in Schools one focus of its work.  We encourage all sectors of U.S. society to be involved with WASH-in-Schools. The solutions to this problem exist and you can do something to help, right now. The WASH-in-Schools brochure outlines some specific ideas, please take a look.

To promote the importance of WASH-in-Schools, Water Advocates and a growing list of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), foundations, corporations, and schools have started a WASH-in-Schools Initiative. The official launch was on March 12, 2008 in Washington D.C. Please see this directory of organizations currently involved with the WASH-in-Schools effort.

This Initiative, building on the current work of UNICEF, governments, and NGOs around the world, focuses on addressing one of the key development challenges of our time - getting water and sanitation to schools and schoolchildren around the world. The problem is not insurmountable, but it is large: only 50% of the developing world’s schools have access to water and sanitation.

This WASH initiative is designed to communicate, particularly to Americans, the story of WASH-in-Schools, and to generate momentum so that many more than 1,000 schools get access to safe water, sanitation, and hygiene over the coming years.  Water Advocates encourages interested corporations, foundations, organizations, and individuals to use this Initiative as a platform to highlight their activities or to pledge their support to do more for WASH in Schools. For more information, please click here to read a one-page document that describes the WASH-in-Schools Initiative.

For additional resources related to the water and schools issue, please click here