Workshop Partner

Workshop Objectives

• To share and learn about critical educational strategies practiced in the water and sanitation sector for the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development.
• To discuss mechanisms to upscale educational strategies through institutions and networking approaches within the water and sanitation sector.
• To discuss and recommend changes to the draft documents for the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development specifically for water and sanitation sector.

The workshop will facilitate sharing of experiences and learning – of ideas, processes, strategies and approaches of education that have worked and/or failed. These will emerge from the various case studies, presentation and discussions at the workshop. There is a scope of highlighting newer processes that have emerged from field experiences.

Outputs of the Workshop

1. A process to initiate the compilation of key learnings on education and communication in the water and sanitation sector with special focus on hygiene awareness, sanitation and water care.
2. Recommendations to create mechanisms for ongoing lateral sharing and for scaling up.

Important Issues to Consider

The Workshop will consider how E&C can help to meet the relevant MDGs relevant to water-sanitation and will discuss key issues including:

• Hygiene Awareness and Sanitation Education
• Strengthening Gender Sensitive Programming
• Strengthening Governance
• Promoting Learning Centers for Water, Sanitation and Hygiene
• Strengthening Demand-driven and People-controlled and Managed Approaches
• Awareness of the ‘Cost’ of water
• Feedback for re-orienting Water Laws and Policies

Role of Education

The principal elements of education include:

• The belief that each of us has both power and responsibility to effect positive change on global scale.
• Education of the right kind can increase people’s capacities to transform their vision for society into reality.
• Education can foster the values, behavior and lifestyles required for a sustainable future.
• Education for sustainable development is a process of learning how to make decisions that consider the long term future of the equity, economy and ecology of all communities.
• Education builds the capacity for such futures-oriented thinking.
• Education includes putting in place evaluation mechanism to assess the progress.