TThe COVID-19 global pandemic has rendered the challenge of delivering safe water and sanitation more urgent than ever and illuminated the critical place of cities during health crises as overcrowded low-income neighborhoods and slums disconnected from basic water and sanitation services threaten to become virus hotspots.

The launch of the Caucus coincides with an increasingly uncertain future for international aid worldwide. In 2020, the world’s top donor countries drastically decreased their foreign aid commitments. During the first five months of 2019, the top 13 donor countries and European Union institutions committed $23.9 billion to foreign aid, while in the same five-month period of 2020, the total aid from that bloc declined to $16.9 billion, a 30% decrease. Donor country economies themselves are struggling during the pandemic and national lockdowns, but the decrease in foreign aid could especially devastate developing countries and humanitarian situations, which are far from declaring the crisis over.

If this trend continues, the delivery of safe water and sanitation services, already tenuous in significant swathes of the world, will suffer with devastating repercussions for virus transmission in cities and across the urban-rural spectrum. It is widely accepted that social distancing and handwashing are critical for mitigating the spread of COVID-19. Yet, both practices are nearly impossible for the one billion people who live in slums around the world. Journalists Saeed Shah and Joe Parkinson have argued that the largest shared vulnerability in developing countries is the “giant urban slums where hundreds of millions live with poor sanitation and no plumbing.” In Africa, for instance, this means that 60% of its urban residents or 587 million people are unable to carry out practices such as hand washing. But, even wealthier cities are not immune to meeting the challenges of urban WASH: during the first months of the COVID-19, Singapore housed its migrant workers in overcrowded dormitories where 10-12 men shared a room and up to 80 might share a single toilet. The city’s migrant workers came to comprise 98% of its cases during the time.

As daunting as the challenge of delivery safe water and sanitation around the world is, the efforts of international and local NGOs to ensure water services are equally impressive. For instance, the Kenyan community organization Shining Hope for Communities Organization (SHOFCO) has endeavored to provide handwashing stations and public health awareness programs to the Kibera slum of Nairobi, where half a million people are disconnected from formal water services. SHOFCO has also installed a network of drinking water points linked by suspended aerial pipes and a purification plant that provides drinking water to residents at a heavily subsidized price.

IHC Global wants to make sure comprehensive water and sanitation policies are the heart of such local initiatives to guarantee long-term sustainability. We believe that policy and action must go hand and hand. Governments must think purposefully about ensuring water and sanitation, commit themselves to the challenge, and work with a multiplicity of partners: civil society, private sector, and in the United States – work “across the aisle.”

That is why we are so excited about the bipartisan Water and Sanitation Caucus initiative! We are optimistic this bipartisan initiative can guide American aid investments and global partnerships and we are proud to join other NGOs, including the advocacy coalition InterAction, to support their endeavor.