Websites

Water, Engineering and Development Centre Site – Water Supply and Sanitation for Disabled People and Other Vulnerable Groups

Summary:
The WEDC website provides research to improve knowledge and use of affordable aids, methodologies, and approaches by water and sanitation service planners and providers, and organisations and individuals who assist disabled people and their families in low-income communities maximise their access and use of the domestic water cycle. There are over 600 million disabled people in the world, of whom over 75% live in developing countries. The poorest suffer from inadequate diet, reduced access to health care, and poor hygiene -- each of which contribute to a higher risk of disability. In turn, disability exacerbates poverty, by placing an added strain on already fragile family economies, and disabled people face problems of access to services and opportunities, compounded by discrimination and social exclusion. Despite all these factors, the poor and disabled are largely ignored by governments and development programmes. WEDC aims to help with social integration, restore dignity to the individual disabled person, and reduce the workload of their family members by improving disabled people's access to and use of the domestic water cycle.

Summary:
Several USAID projects have developed training materials and participant manuals for integrating WASH into home-based and facility care. These provide more detailed "how tos": both how to improve sanitation and hand washing through behavior change, and how to build capacity of professional and lay cadres. USAID’s AIDSTAR I program has developed a comprehensive training guide and materials for health workers available from the AIDSTAR website.

Summary:
HIV compromises the nutritional status of infected individuals and malnutrition worsens the effects of the disease. Nutrition interventions can help break this cycle by helping PLHIV manage symptoms, reduce susceptibility to opportunistic infections, improve nutritional status, promote response to medical treatment, and improve overall quality of life. Specifically,with support from USAID and PEPFAR, FANTA-2: a) provides technical assistance to strengthen nutrition assessment, counseling, and support for PLHIV; b) improves food assistance security programming in the context of HIV; c) produces and disseminates program guidance on nutritional care and support interventions; d) helps countries in east and southern Africa adapt HIV-nutrition guidance to their specific contexts through national guidelines, training curricula and programs, counseling materials, monitoring and evaluation support, and capacity-building activities; e) provides in-country support to integrate and scale up nutrition interventions in HIV services in Kenya, Namibia, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zambia; f) strengthens the evidence base about the impacts of food supplementation on malnourished PLHIV; g) supports randomized controlled evaluations in Malawi and Kenya; and h) supports improved program design and monitoring and evaluation of food-assisted programs addressing HIV and its impacts through technical assistance to USAID.