With 2.2 billion people around the world still lacking reliable access to clean drinking water, and climate change–related droughts and floods increasingly exacerbating the situation, the need to fundamentally transform the way we manage this most critical of global resources has never been more urgent.
But, as suggested by the wording of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 6 – “Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all” – securing access to clean water is just one part of a two-part challenge. Sanitation is by far the more complex and costly issue to address, but it is what will lead to clean water, so the two must be considered concurrently.
Dr Jacqueline (Jacquie) Thomas, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Engineering at the School of Civil Engineering, University of Sydney, explains that this is why her work tackles both issues hand in hand.
“My current work started out by looking at providing clean drinking water to reduce diarrhoeal disease, especially in children under five [for whom it is the third-leading cause of death globally],” she says. “But the reason the water is dirty is because of contamination from poor sanitation. So clean water is the end goal, but what is key is understanding what challenges communities are facing in trying to reach clean drinking water.”
These challenges can encompass not just environmental pollution, lack of sanitation infrastructure and increased demand for water due to population growth, but also social elements including cultural norms relating to water use, social and gender roles, divisions of responsibilities between local governments, community leaders and others, and availability of financial and other resources to fix the community’s sanitation problems.
“So it’s not just a technical approach,” Jacquie says of her work. “Tech is big part of it, but not all – we also need to work with communities to educate them to improve their own water and sanitation.
“To be successful, this kind of work by its nature needs to be multidisciplinary, taking into account local politics, resource limitations, social roles, cultural norms and gender roles as well as available technologies, infrastructure and so on. For a project to succeed, all those elements need to be aligned. If a piece of the puzzle is missing, the project will not work well, or it will be rejected by the community and it won’t be used at all.
“That’s why I really like this work,” she adds. “I’m not a classic environmental engineer – I’m a water, sanitation and hygiene (WaSH)–focused engineer, so I take a wholistic approach to these issues while considering all the complexities of work in international low-resource settings.”
Jacquie didn’t start her career as an environmental engineer. She began by studying microbiology, to which she now attributes her strong grounding in many of the technical skills she uses in her current work.
Studying microbiology also ignited her interest in improving the world’s water quality – but not from the confines of a lab. “I’m an outdoors person,” she says, “so I knew that being in a lab all day wasn’t for me. I really had my heart set on international development work, but I needed to figure out how to match up my skills with what was needed in the sector – something more hands-on. That’s now I ultimately ended up as a WaSH engineer.”
Still, there wasn’t a clear pathway from one to the other. In particular, Jacquie recalls, “Networking with people in the international development field was hard while being based in Australia, because the people doing this work aren’t visible here – they’re overseas, doing this work!”
But her motivation was clear, even if her pathway wasn’t, and pursuing her real passion, she now reflects, “has led me to somewhere I never expected.”
That includes recently having finished supervising the University of Sydney’s first cohort of humanitarian engineering PhD graduates.
When Jacquie joined the University in 2016 – fresh from working on drinking water and sanitation in rural Tanzania – it was to teach in the new Humanitarian Engineering major, one of the first offered by an Australian university.
Since then she has led more than 180 undergraduate students studying fieldwork-based engineering units to Samoa, India, the Philippines and Myanmar (funded by the federal Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s New Colombo Plan), and established an on-campus virtual reality lab where students can ‘walk through’ a remote village in Niger filmed in real conditions to get a genuine sense of how the community lives, prepares food, uses available resources and so on.
“I’ve done some really exciting things with the University’s support,” she reflects. “The University will invest in you if you’ve got the ideas. They’re very supportive, and have also have helped me to attract philanthropic funding for the work I do. There are as many opportunities out there as I have time in the day to pursue.”
One of those opportunities has been to increase the representation of women in her field, something she believes is particularly important.
“When we design things, it’s gendered,” she explains. “Particularly in this field, there are different gendered roles and uses for water and toilets, including those relating to menstruation, babies’ nappies and so on. So a female perspective is essential. That applies to just about every field – a female perspective is very useful. It’s a different worldview. We have different experiences. And the same applies to other minorities. I think it’s useful as a woman – as it is for other minorities – to stand up and say, ‘That wasn’t my experience’.”
With reliable and equitable access to clean drinking water essential not only to human health but also to environmental sustainability, food safety, community development and the reduction of poverty, Jacquie’s unique combination of passion, skills, perspectives and experiences are all contributing to the achievement of this critically important global goal.
This article was first published by the University of Sydney. You can find the original here.