ReviewBMJ global health2024
Water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH): the evolution of a global health and development sector.
Review in BMJ global health, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Priorities and opportunities for strengthening hygiene and One Health alignment in research, policy and practice.BMC global and public health · 2026Review
- The association between personal hygiene and mental health, and the modifying roles of the universal health coverage index in children and adolescents: a comparative analysis from multiple countries.Journal of global health · 2026Article
- Conducting process evaluations of WASH interventions: a scoping review of design approaches and indicators in low- and middle-income countries.Implementation science communications · 2026Article
- Strategies for achieving a healthy oral cholera vaccine market: Model-enabled scenario exploration of supply and demand dynamics.PLoS neglected tropical diseases · 2026Article
- Impact of Health Education on Infectious Disease Knowledge in Indigenous Communities in Northwestern Malaysia.Tropical medicine and infectious disease · 2025Article
- Decolonizing global health: a scoping review.BMC health services research · 2025Article
- Exploring the Impact of Traditional Practices onInternational journal of environmental research and public health · 2025Article
- The persistence of failure in water, sanitation and hygiene programming: a qualitative study.BMJ global health · 2025Article
- Increasing childhood illnesses (diarrhea and fever) and decreasing care-seeking practices in Nepal: Insights from three most recent Demographic and Health Surveys (2011, 2016 and 2022).PLOS global public health · 2025Article
- Decolonizing infectious disease programs: A mixed methods analysis of a novel multi-country virtual training for Female Genital Schistosomiasis.PLOS global public health · 2025Article
- Burden of microbial pathogens-associated infectious diseases in Asian older adults: a systematic analysis derived from the global burden of disease 2021.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- Exploring Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene Status and Health Outcomes in Zimbabwe: A Scoping Review of Literature.Inquiry : a journal of medical care organization, provision and financingArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
13 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Despite some progress, universal access to safe water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) by 2030-a remit of Sustainable Development Goal 6-remains a distant prospect in many countries. Policy-makers and implementers of the WASH sector are challenged to track a new path. This research aimed to identify core orienting themes of the sector, as legacies of past processes, which can provide insights for its future. We reviewed global policy, science and programmatic documents and carried out 19 expert interviews to track the evolution of the global WASH sector over seven decades. We situated this evolution in relation to wider trends in global health and development over the same time period.With transnational flows of concern, expertise and resources from high-income to lower-income countries, the WASH sector evolved over decades of international institutionalisation of health and development with (1) a focus on technologies (technicalisation), (2) a search for generalised solutions (universalisation), (3) attempts to make recipients responsible for environmental health (responsibilisation) and (4) the shaping of programmes around quantifiable outcomes (metricisation). The emergent commitment of the WASH sector to these core themes reflects a pragmatic response in health and development to depoliticise poverty and social inequalities in order to enable action. This leads to questions about what potential solutions have been obscured, a recognition which might be understood as 'uncomfortable knowledge'-the knowns that have had to be unknown, which resonate with concerns about deep inequalities, shrinking budgets and the gap between what could and has been achieved.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.