Content area
Full text
INTRODUCTION
Pacific Island Countries and Territories (PICTs) experience some of the lowest levels of improved water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) on Earth (WHO 2016). Yet the United Nations General Assembly has recognised that access to safe water and sanitation are standalone universal human rights (United Nations 2015). The global community has committed to achieving 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. This commitment includes Goal 6 which states that access to safely managed WASH should be universally available and is a global priority (United Nations 2017).
WASH are essential for life and often directly related to experiences of poverty and/or conflict. It is estimated that 844 million people globally do not have access to basic sources of drinking water (defined as originating from an improved water source within a 30-minute roundtrip), and 2.3 billion people lack access to basic sanitation facilities (defined as improved facilities that are not shared with other households) (WHO & UNICEF 2017). In PICTs, only one-third of people have access to basic sanitation facilities and half to basic water sources (WHO & UNICEF 2017). These statistics hide inequities between PICTs, with four PICTs (Kiribati, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu and Vanuatu) assessed as Least Developed Nations (as at July 2017, United Nations Committee for Development Policy 2017). For example, availability of basic water for PICTs ranges from 98% for Niue, to 37% for Papua New Guinea (PNG) (WHO & UNICEF 2017). In the Solomon Islands, only 31% of the population have access to basic sanitation (WHO & UNICEF 2017), and 66% of the population live in areas where open defecation is common (World Bank Group 2017).
For the purpose of this manuscript, we adopt the UNICEF definition of WASH:
‘WASH is the collective term for water, sanitation and hygiene. Due to their interdependent nature, these three core issues are grouped together to represent a growing sector. While each (is) a separate field of work, each is dependent on the presence of the other. For example, without toilets, water sources become contaminated; without clean water, basic hygiene practices are not possible’ (UNICEF 2017).
We also adopt the definition of a system as:
‘A set of things – people, cells, molecules, or whatever – interconnected in such a way that they produce...