National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies work to strengthen local knowledge and capacities in order to help communities to provide emergency water and sanitation services and to design and implement participatory and sustainable interventions.
Water, sanitation and hygiene promotion programmes aim to reduce the risk of water-borne and water-related diseases by providing:
• the ‘hardware’ aspects of disaster response, recovery and developmental interventions (engineering inputs, equipment and material), and
• the ‘software’ aspects of hygiene promotion, behavioural change, community mobilization and community-managed operation and maintenance of water and sanitation infrastructure.
Red Cross Red Crescent work aims to address the disparity in water and sanitation coverage by targeting the populations that are the most difficult to reach and those contributing to building resilient communities and reducing health inequities.