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ACI Avances en Ciencias e Ingenierías

SECTION C: ENGINEERING

Vol. 15 No. 2 (2023)

Assessment of WASH barriers in semi-rural Andean communities - Pilot study

DOI
https://doi.org/10.18272/aci.v15i2.2986
Submitted
May 17, 2023
Published
2023-12-07

Abstract

Water service in rural areas is a problem as they constantly fail to deliver a complete and efficient service to all users dependent on it or the systems implemented fail to be sustainable with the service and impact desired. Ecuador is no exception to this problem and like many other countries in the world it has failures in the quality of its rural water distribution systems. Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) sector approaches have been aimed at understanding the problems related to water, sanitation, and hygiene, as well as improving systems to achieve high impact public health and sustainable solutions. In Ecuador, WASH has attempted to develop an evidence-based database focused on the status of WASH targets and their relationship to poverty. The objective of this study is to raise barriers found in semi-rural Andean communities based on indicators raised around three approaches: cultural, third-party intervention and physical. For this purpose, interviews were elaborated based on compiled information provided by United Nations Children´s Fund (UNICEF) relevant to the evaluation of aspects related to water, sanitation, and hygiene in households. The information obtained from the respondents' answers was transcribed in order to elaborate a database, then the answers that had the same theme encompassing the key idea were grouped and coded. The results were then filtered based on the indicators of the 3 dimensions proposed in this pilot study, from which a table was created with the barriers found. As results we found barriers related to each of the indicators, highlighting the cultural aspect of water consumption and the role of women within the family, physical limitations, and the lack of technology to solve them and the lack of support or incomplete support from third parties. It is important to understand that communities act as complex systems where the same barriers cannot be extended to all the contexts of semi-rural Andean areas, much less Ecuador, each community must be studied individually to find their respective limitations and provide the most appropriate solution to have a high impact and be sustainable.

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