Indigenous peoples in Latin American and the Caribbean (LAC) are 10 to 25 percent less likely to have access to piped water and 26 percent less likely to have access to improved sanitation solutions than the region’s non-indigenous population. Historically, Indigenous peoples have been marginalized from the development process in their own countries and still suffer discrimination from the mainstream societies today. Oftentimes, Indigenous territories are overlooked or avoided by Water Supply and Sanitation (WSS) project planners and proponents given their lack of understanding of how to engage or carry out projects in collective or semi-autonomous Indigenous territories, the remoteness of these areas, and the high associated per capita cost of a potential operation, among other reasons. The significant gap in Indigenous peoples’ access to WSS services, a basic human right that is closely linked to economic and social wellbeing, alongside the lack of established tools in the sector to guide engagement in Indigenous territories, motivated the creation of this Toolkit. The objective of the Toolkit is to provide practical guidance and operational tools to improve the inclusion of, engagement with, and delivery of sustainable WSS services to Indigenous peoples in LAC in order to permanently close the WSS service gap. The Toolkit summarizes the findings of interviews, consultations, and field visits carried out by a multi-sector, multi-national World Bank Team in 37 Indigenous communities located in urban, peri-urban and rural areas in seven LAC countries where the World Bank or other development actors had implemented WSS projects with Indigenous peoples.

Between 1996 and 2005, natural catastrophic events had an estimated cost of US$575.2 billion world-wide. In particular, it has been observed that developing countries are relatively more affected by such events, since its gross domestic product (GDP) have showed sharper declines than developed countries' ratios. On August 15, 2007, an earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale shook the southern part of the central coast of Peru, with devastating consequences. Given the magnitude of the damage caused, one wonders how much less the cost of rehabilitating water and sanitation systems might have been if public investment projects and management of urban utilities (companies in charge of the water and sanitation provision), had incorporated disaster risk reduction measures. For this reason, and because this is a key public sector service for the wellbeing of population, the World Bank's water and sanitation program commissioned Apoyo Consultoria S.A.C. to conduct a research on the water and sanitation sector in order to attend the following inquiry: how much unpreparedness cost to the sector providing water and sanitation services? In other words, in economic terms, what will have been the gain to society or the reconstruction savings if risk prevention measures had been included in the management of services in the sector proposed for the analysis?

During the past decade countries in the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region have lifted more than 50 million people out of poverty, yet half of the rural population in the region still lacks access to sanitation and approximately 20 percent to drinking water. In January 2012, policy makers, scholars, and practitioners from nine LAC countries came together in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic to explore the opportunities and challenges of integrating in a more systematic and sustainable way the promotion of hygiene and sanitation behavioral change into water and sanitation investments. During the conference in Santo Domingo, it became evident that a common understanding is currently emerging from most countries in the sense that infrastructure by itself will not solve the global problems of inadequate access to improved sanitation and potable water, unless people adopt new behaviors. Therefore, there is a need to spread learning on best practices to implement cost effective water, sanitation and hygiene models, which bring about change at home and in the community at scale. This paper highlights key issues that arose in presentations and group discussions during the conference, which, can lead to substantial improvements in the provision of a multi-sector approach to hindering sustainable water and sanitation services for all.

Shallow groundwater is the main source for drinking water in Kabul, Afghanistan. It comes from a multitude of shallow hand-pumped wells spread over the whole city area. The groundwater is characterised by slightly oxic redox conditions. Interactions with aquifer carbonates lead to near-neutral pH and high degrees of hardness. The mostly negative water budget of the Kabul Basin is the result of strong evaporation which leads to an increase in salt and also of some undesirable constituents, e.g. borate. Several years of drought have aggravated this problem. The shallow groundwater in the city has received tremendous amounts of pollution due to a lack of proper waste disposal and sewage treatment. Common indicators are elevated concentrations of nutrients such as nitrate and faecal bacteria. The high infant mortality can at least partially be attributed to the insufficient water hygiene. Acid generated during the mineralisation of the wastewater is hidden due to the strong pH buffering capacity of the groundwater system. Redox and pH conditions preclude significant mobilisation of trace metals and metalloids.