Water & Sanitation Services: Creating Employment Opportunities for Youth & Women:

27^th to 29^th April 2010

… Practical Answers to Poverty …

Netwas International and partners are pleased to announce the upcoming seminar on Water and Sanitation: Creating Employment Opportunities for Youth & Women. The three-and-a-half-day event will take place in the coastal city of Mombasa, Kenya, from 22nd to 25th September 2009. The overarching theme of the seminar is to address poverty, particularly among women and youth, through creation of employment opportunities from provision of water and sanitation services. The seminar will bring together professionals, practitioners and policy-makers who have an interest or stake in this subject. 

Seminar Diary:

• <!--[if !supportLists]-->Registration opens by:1^st Dec.‘09
• <!--[if !supportLists]--><!--[endif]-->Abstracts received by: 28^th Feb..‘2010
• <!--[if !supportLists]--> <!--[endif]-->Selected authors notified by15^th March. ‘2010
• <!--[if !supportLists]--> <!--[endif]-->Full-length papers received by 30^th March.‘2010
• <!--[if !supportLists]--><!--[endif]-->Seminar held:   ‘2010

Objectives

To share experiences, lessons learned and best practices in creating youth and women’s employment through provision of water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) services

To formulate common recommendations for improving programmes and/or projects that address youth and women’s employment through WASH

To raise the profile of WASH as a viable approach to solving the problem of unemployment and poverty among youth and women in urban pre-urban and rural settings

To improve knowledge, skills and attitude of the participants toward WASH-based enterprises for young people and women    

Background & Justification

WASH – Water, Sanitation and Hygiene – issues are connected to, and form the backbone of many other development issues. Malnutrition, disease, poverty, productivity, the position of women and girls and depletion of natural resources are all intertwined with WASH. Therefore, addressing water, sanitation and hygiene is central to sustainable development. This was acknowledged by the world’s leaders when in the Millennium Summit (New York, 2000), they included water and sanitation in the list of targets defining the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). MDGs define a vision for where the world should be by 2015, and now include the targets (#10 and #11) to reduce by half, the number of people without access to safe water and adequate sanitation by that time.

This seminar will focus on how water and sanitation sector can provide essential employment and business opportunities to youth and women and, conversely, the role that local entrepreneurs can play in boosting the water and sanitation sector in developing countries. The seminar organizers believe that the WASH sector holds great potential for increasing employment for those who need it most. These opportunities cover, to a small extent, the ‘official’, mainstream job market in water and sanitation, and to a larger extent the opportunities available ‘outside the box’, in the informal sector, in the small businesses existing next to the mainstream utilities, and in filling the gaps that these mainstream utilities and companies are not (yet) able to fill. The later opportunities are most easily available to the poor, the unskilled, and the inexperienced. Also, these are the businesses that once accepted and included in the mainstream system, can make a real difference in increasing and improving access of millions of people to safe water and sanitation services.

Themes

The seminar presentation will be built around 5 themes:

WASH for livelihoods/WASH-based IGAs including small-scale service providers

Linking gender and youth issues with WASH issues

The role of technologies

Training and capacity-building

Financing and policy issues

Approach

The seminar will take a sharing approach, driven by modulated thematic discussions and sharing of practical experiences. Thematic posters/presentations will provide ground for plenary discussions and concussions. A field trip to a youth/women’s project that generates employment through WASH services will be arranged.

Mombasa is emerging as a major tourist destination in Eastern African. Participants wishing to sample some of the attractive features of Kenya’s coast can use the afternoon of the fourth day for the purpose, or arrange to remain in  the city for as long as they wish.   

Financing

A registration fee of US$150 will be charged per participant to cater for materials,  field trip and publicity banners. Registration fee for participants from the East Africa (Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi) shall pay Kshs. 8,000/=. Participants will meet their own travel and accommodation costs. The negotiated accommodation cost at the Plaza Beach Hotel, the venue of the seminar, is US$120 for full board and US$90 for half-board per person per day.  The Seminar Secretariat will be willing to handle the accommodation issues for those who choose to pay for accommodation through Netwas. Because of budgetary constraint, we may not be able to sponsor participants as we have traditionally done. We therefore urge those interested in attending this seminar to seek sponsorship from their employers, donors or partners.    

Register on line by filling the attached form and clicking send, or down-load the registration form and send as an attachment to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

For every five participants from the same sponsor, the Seminar Secretariat shall waive the registration fee for the sixth participant nominated by the same sponsor.

Call for papers and abstracts

Netwas and partners now call for papers/posters that best address the seminar objectives. If you are interested in presenting a paper or poster in this seminar on any of the five themes above, please send us an abstract, 200 – 300 word, to reach us on or before 30th June 2009. All received abstracts will be reviewed for their quality and relevance in addressing the seminar objectives. Authors of the accepted 12 to 15 abstracts will be notified by 28^th February, 2010. They will be required to submit full-length articles (2,000 – 2,500 words) on or before 15^th  March, 2010. Those who submit abstracts will receive individual acknowledgement emails.      Abstracts and any correspondence about this workshop must be sent by email to: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . Please indicate the theme/s covered.

Exhibitors

Registration fee for exhibitors will be US$200. Exhibitors will be allocated a space of 2 x 2 meters, where they can set-up their displays. Due to limited space, the exhibition space shall be allocated on a first come basis. The exhibitors will be responsible for organizing the equipping the exhibition space/site and meeting all other expenses such as accommodation. The exhibition fee shall include the cost of erecting temporary movable partitions around the cubicles.