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The WASH Systems Academy

The WASH Systems Academy

The learning platform for water, sanitation and hygiene systems strengthening

Building blocks of sustainable WASH systems

Course objectives: The water sanitation and hygiene systems strengthening approach looks at the system through the lens of nine critical "building blocks" like monitoring, finance and policy and legislation. Each session in this course focuses on one of these building blocks of a sustainable system, and introduces tools and methodologies to start applying the approach and assess the strength of the system in your context. Every session has extra optional materials if you want to know more.

Course content: This course includes podcasts, animations, graphics, videos, documentation and multiple-choice tests. There is also the opportunity to connect with other WASH sector professionals through online forum discussions. The majority of this course is also available offline. You can download the complete session texts, including all the exercises, via the course resources tab. This allows you to follow part of the course offline. However, you will need to connect to the online platform to participate in the forum discussions, upload the materials you create and complete the multiple-choice tests and quizzes.

Hilton Foundation and The Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs logos

Session overview: The content of this course covers the building blocks of sustainable WASH systems and is divided into 11 sessions. The course sessions should be followed in consecutive order:

  • Session 1: Introducing the building blocks
  • Session 2: Policy and legislation
  • Session 3: Institutions
  • Session 4: Finance
  • Session 5: Planning
  • Session 6: Regulation and accountability
  • Session 7: Monitoring
  • Session 8: Infrastructure development
  • Session 9: Infrastructure management
  • Session 10: Learning and adaptation
  • Session 11: Water resources management

Length: On average, the course takes a minimum of 16 hours to complete.

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