Essential WASH Components in Emergencies: Water, Sanitation, Hygiene

When disasters strike, access to clean water, safe sanitation, and proper hygiene-collectively known as WASH-becomes a matter of life and death. Whether responding to earthquakes, conflicts, or disease outbreaks, humanitarian organizations must rapidly deploy WASH interventions to prevent waterborne illnesses and protect human dignity. Understanding the core components of emergency WASH programming helps responders save lives and build community resilience in crisis situations.

Safe water supply options in emergencies
Water trucking: fast but costly
Well rehabilitation: restoring existing infrastructure
Rainwater harvesting: a sustainable supplement
Sanitation solutions for emergencies
Pit latrines: the traditional approach
Container-based sanitation: innovation in challenging environments
Hygiene promotion best practices
Handwashing campaigns in Nepal
Hygiene kit distributions in Syria
Monitoring and sustainability
Water quality testing protocols
Long-term maintenance of WASH facilities

Safe water supply options in emergencies

Providing sufficient quantities of safe water is the first priority in any emergency response. Water sources in emergencies can include groundwater, surface water, rainwater, or trucked water, with selection based on feasibility, distance to source, water quality, and population needs.

Water trucking: fast but costly

Water trucking delivers an immediate water supply when other options are unavailable. Emergency WASH guidelines recommend water trucking only as a short-term measure during the acute response phase, as it has high ongoing costs and complex management requirements. In northwest Syria, Global Communities provides 3.6 million liters of potable water daily to camp residents via trucking and water networks, ensuring 25 liters per person per day reaches displaced families.

Effective water trucking requires careful planning: tanker capacities range from 5-20 cubic meters, and vehicles must be properly maintained, cleaned, and disinfected. Routes need surveying for challenges like bridge weight restrictions and road conditions. Critically, tankers that previously carried non-food-grade liquids like fuel should never be used for drinking water.

Well rehabilitation: restoring existing infrastructure

Rehabilitating damaged water infrastructure offers a more sustainable alternative to trucking. Following the 2004 Asian tsunami, emergency teams in the Andaman Islands worked to restore salt-contaminated wells, though the massive intrusion of saline groundwater posed significant challenges. In Yemen, WASH programs have rehabilitated 29 rural community water points, water reservoirs, and installed solar-powered pumps to reduce dependency on costly fuel.

Successful well rehabilitation requires community involvement and training water committee members to ensure long-term operation and maintenance. This approach addresses not just immediate needs but builds local capacity for ongoing water system management.

Rainwater harvesting: a sustainable supplement

Rainwater harvesting serves as an alternative water supply option, particularly valuable in areas with intense rainfall or where conventional sources are depleted. Systems range from simple household roof catchments with gutters and storage tanks to larger communal collection systems. For emergency purposes, Oxfam tanks of various sizes can be deployed based on collection and storage capacity needs.

While rainwater requires minimal treatment when efficiently collected, proper storage and periodic chlorination remain essential. Ground surface collection systems are generally suited to arid and semi-arid areas where intense rainfall creates high runoff, though they require regular inspection for damage and contamination prevention.

Sanitation solutions for emergencies

Proper excreta disposal is critical for preventing disease outbreaks in displaced populations. UNHCR sanitation standards specify that no toilet should be used by more than 20 persons, with toilets arranged by household or segregated by sex to ensure safety and dignity.

Pit latrines: the traditional approach

Pit latrines remain the most common emergency sanitation solution, evolving from simple pits to properly ventilated structures. In the first emergency phase, temporary communal latrines are constructed from plastic sheeting and local materials, typically lasting three to six months. Later phases transition to household latrines where families dig their own pits under technical supervision, creating ownership that encourages better maintenance.

The 1994 Goma crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo demonstrated the catastrophic consequences when sanitation fails: approximately 50,000 refugees died, partly because volcanic rock ground made latrine construction impossible, leading to widespread contamination and cholera outbreaks.

Container-based sanitation: innovation in challenging environments

In Haiti, where less than 1% of human waste is safely treated, SOIL (Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods) has pioneered container-based sanitation (CBS). Their EkoLakay service provides households with portable toilets that collect waste in sealable containers, which are then transported to treatment facilities for safe processing into agricultural-grade compost.

Research in Cap Haitien found that CBS resulted in a 3.5-fold decrease in unmanaged feces and nearly eliminated open defecation among service recipients. This approach is particularly valuable in Haiti’s dense urban settlements where narrow alleys, frequent flooding, and high water tables make pit latrines unsuitable. Over 80% of EkoLakay customers had never previously had a toilet, highlighting how CBS can reach populations that conventional sanitation cannot serve.

The model addresses multiple challenges simultaneously: protecting water sources from contamination, returning nutrients to Haiti’s depleted soils through composting, and creating local employment. SOIL’s toilets save an estimated 19,200 gallons of water annually per unit compared to flush toilets, while removing over 40 metric tons of waste from urban communities monthly.

Hygiene promotion best practices

Providing water and sanitation infrastructure alone is insufficient without accompanying behavior change. Simple handwashing with soap can reduce diarrheal disease incidence by nearly half and respiratory infections by nearly a quarter, yet only one in five people globally practice regular handwashing.

Handwashing campaigns in Nepal

Following the devastating 2015 earthquake that damaged over 7,700 water supply schemes and 388,000 sanitation facilities, Nepal faced heightened risk of waterborne disease outbreaks. UNICEF, Johns Hopkins University, and local partners launched comprehensive awareness campaigns targeting households, food outlets, and schools. Female Community Health Volunteers conducted door-to-door visits, demonstrating proper use of point-of-use water treatment products and soap distribution.

These campaigns focused on five key messages: household water treatment, safe water storage, handwashing, food hygiene, and basic sanitation. Prevention messages were also aired on radio and spread through vehicles equipped with amplification equipment to reach dispersed populations. UNICEF’s earthquake response reached over 295,000 people with water access and more than 259,000 with hygiene education messages in severely affected districts.

Hygiene kit distributions in Syria

In Syria’s ongoing crisis, hygiene kit distributions have reached over 43,000 families in displacement camps. These kits typically contain soap, toothbrushes, toothpaste, sanitary products, and towels-items that help families maintain basic hygiene and preserve dignity despite displacement. Electronic vouchers have enabled nearly 14,000 families to purchase additional hygiene goods based on their specific needs.

During the 2022 cholera outbreak in northwest Syria, Global Communities intensified awareness-raising through household visits, group sessions, and distribution of educational materials. Key messages included handwashing with soap, avoiding drainage water, eating well-cooked meals, and understanding the risks of unchlorinated water. Gender-sensitive programming ensured women and girls received appropriate sanitation facilities with features like latrine lighting and doors with locks.

Monitoring and sustainability

Effective WASH programming requires ongoing monitoring and planning for long-term maintenance to prevent infrastructure failure and ensure continued health protection.

Water quality testing protocols

In the initial phases of an emergency, all water sources should be assumed contaminated, and chlorination with residual testing should always be conducted for water supplied to camp populations. Rapid sanitary surveys identify contamination risks, with bacteriological tests reserved for handover of improved water sources and during disease outbreaks.

Sphere Standards guide water quality monitoring, specifying that drinking water points should include systematic testing to assess contamination and enable treatment process modifications. In southern Syria, Water Safety Plan programming showed strong associations with adequate free chlorine residual in household water, with households receiving WSP interventions 24 times more likely to have safe chlorine levels compared to non-intervention areas.

Long-term maintenance of WASH facilities

Sustainability requires transitioning from emergency response to community ownership. Training water committee members ensures newly rehabilitated WASH assets are effectively operated and managed. In Yemen, 181 water committee members received training to maintain rehabilitated infrastructure, while 461 hygiene promoters were trained to provide ongoing WASH messaging to communities.

One of the main challenges with emergency latrines is maintenance-communal facilities used by hundreds daily often deteriorate because nobody takes ownership. Moving from communal to household latrines creates accountability, but consistent hygiene promotion activities remain essential to ensure proper cleaning and usage.

Climate resilience increasingly shapes WASH planning. Container-based sanitation demonstrates how emergency interventions can address immediate needs while building sustainable systems-SOIL’s approach protects water resources, creates local employment, and produces compost for agricultural restoration, showing that crisis response can plant seeds for long-term development.

What do you think? How can emergency WASH programming better balance the urgency of immediate response with the need for sustainable, community-owned solutions? What role should innovative technologies like container-based sanitation play in future humanitarian responses?

References

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Table of Contents

Safe water supply options in emergencies 🔗

Water trucking: fast but costly 🔗

Well rehabilitation: restoring existing infrastructure 🔗

Rainwater harvesting: a sustainable supplement 🔗

Sanitation solutions for emergencies 🔗

Pit latrines: the traditional approach 🔗

Container-based sanitation: innovation in challenging environments 🔗

Hygiene promotion best practices 🔗

Handwashing campaigns in Nepal 🔗

Hygiene kit distributions in Syria 🔗

Monitoring and sustainability 🔗

Water quality testing protocols 🔗

Long-term maintenance of WASH facilities 🔗