Near the start of our PhDs (September 2020) Professor Barbara Evans (director of the Water-WISER CDT) put Ruth Sylvester and I (Georgia Hales) in contact with Kimberly Worsham, founder and director of FLUSH, an American sanitation and hygiene education, advocacy, and consultancy organisation. Kim was already working with two others – Kelsey McWilliams and Euphresia Luseka – but needed extra help on data collection.

Our task was to collect demographic data on 1472 global sanitation leaders across 105 organisations. Once Kim and Kelsey had cleaned and analysed the data, Ruth and I wrote the results up (reviewed by the others) into the paper ‘Leadership for SDG6.2: Is diversity missing?’ which was published in Sage’s Environmental Health insights journal in July 2021. We included a rigorous recommendations list, taking evidence-based solutions from the health, international development, and business sectors. Through this work we want to keep the conversations around intersectionality, decolonisation and equity going and hope that our recommendations are acted upon. We intend for this work to act as a baseline to assess the progress towards a more diverse, equitable and inclusive sector, both internally and within its wider structures.

We have presented the work via poster at the Colorado WASH Symposium in March 2021 and via presentation at the WEDC conference in September 2021. We also presented the work at the UNC Water and Health conference in October 2021. Please follow this link if you would like to watch the recording of the presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Saf6ecWeoT8&ab_channel=WEDCPublications