FEICOM partners with IOM to improve migration governance.

The Director General of FEICOM, Philippe Camille Akoa, said the deal aims to comply with the agreement signed between the government and the IOM for the period 2022-2026.

He said the partnership aims to promote the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene, WASH initiative, by grouping parties in the field of inclusive and sustainable management of water and sanitation.

Akoa elaborated that WASH is a global initiative that integrates effort by governments, UN agencies; like UNICEF and WHO; and Non-Governmental Organisations, NGOs, to improve public health, quality of life, and economic development by providing essential services to communities, schools, and healthcare facilities. 

“The core purpose of the WASH Initiative is to prevent waterborne diseases; such as cholera, diarrhea, and typhoid; that kill over one million people annually—many of them children—and to implement the human right to clean water and sanitation,” Akoa recalled from the UN document, approving WASH. 

He dissected the three closely linked components of WASH, which include improving access to safe water by providing sustainable, reliable, and safe drinking water through piped water, protected wells, boreholes, used by households and institutions.

He also cited improving sanitation through safe disposal of waste which requires creating access to, and encouraging the use of, safe, private toilets that hygienically separate human waste from human contact, and ending practices like open defecation.

The third option, he said, is to change hygiene behaviour by promoting essential hygiene practices, particularly handwashing with soap at critical times, which is recognized as one of the most cost-effective health interventions. This also includes menstrual hygiene management, MHM. 

The World Health Organisation, WHO, insists that safe drinking-water, sanitation and hygiene are crucial to human health and well-being. 

According to experts, Safe WASH is not only a prerequisite to health, but contributes to livelihoods, school attendance and dignity and helps to create resilient communities living in healthy environments.

They say drinking unsafe water impairs health through illnesses such as diarrhoea, and untreated excreta contaminates groundwaters and surface waters used for drinking-water, irrigation, bathing and household purposes. 

Chemical contamination of water continues to pose a health burden, whether natural in origin such as arsenic and fluoride, or anthropogenic such as nitrate.

Safe and sufficient WASH plays a key role in preventing numerous NTDs such as trachoma, soil-transmitted helminths and schistosomiasis. Diarrhoeal deaths as a result of inadequate WASH were reduced by half during the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) period (1990–2015), with the significant progress on water and sanitation provision playing a key role.

Evidence gathered by the WHO suggests that improving service levels towards safely managed drinking-water or sanitation such as regulated piped water or connections to sewers with wastewater treatment can dramatically improve health by reducing diarrheal disease deaths.

This article was first published in The Guardian Post Edition No:3754 of Wednesday April 08, 2026