From 20 to 24 June, 2011, 45 WatSan practitioners and wider development specialists from both humanitarian aid and from development cooperation gathered in Gwatt, Switzerland at the 27th AUGASAN Workshop. The event was dedicated to identifying how to foster the potentials of the human rights to water and sanitation towards increased equity in access and coverage for all. Presentations from resource persons, discussions in the plenary, topic cases, group activities, storytelling and an excursion supported the exchange and learning process, as well as, the development of new ideas around the topic.

At the end of the week, a common understanding of the human rights to water and sanitation was achieved and a toolkit outline with the title of “A human rights lens for the WASH sector”, was developed, presented and discussed by and among participants. The target audience of this toolkit is the wider AGUASAN community and it has a focus on internal and external processes (cross-cutting criteria) along the project management cycle to achieve the objective of the human rights to water and sanitation (normative criteria). The structure and initial content of the toolkit have been adopted, whilst next steps are to compile all existing tools and practices (case studies) in order to develop a draft document and then to test the toolkit on the field in an iterative process.

The results of the workshop are available as online/downloadable PPT presentation at www.aguasan.ch.

All AGUASAN Workshop reports can be downloaded or ordered in the publications section of the Skat website.