Access to drinking water, sanitation and hygiene in marginalized populations. Case study: "Grota do Estrondo" community, Maceió - Alagoas.
WASH, Public Health, Household Practices, SDGs
Safe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene - WASH, are indispensable for public health and human well-being; in addition to play an important role in the global mobilization to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals - ODS/UN. According to the WHO, 829,000 people die each year as a result of using unsafe water, poor sanitation and poor hand hygiene. The suburb population is the one that suffers the most from such problems, public services do not arrive in these regions at the same speed as they arrive in central places of the city, in addition, there is a lack of resources to purchase hygiene/cleaning items and drinking water; there is also a lack of knowledge of household practices to prevent WASH-related diseases. Sanitation is the main barrier that can isolate fecal pathogens and prevent them from reaching the environment. However, there are also secondary barriers, such as water treatment and hand washing, and tertiary barriers that are related to the hygiene of household items. This research aims to evaluate possible divergences between the management and planning of access to WASH in poor suburbs communities and what is currently proposed as a benchmark for meeting the SDGs/UN. Therefore, it will focus on a study based on the community “Grota do Estrondo”, located in Maceió, Alagoas. The research will be qualitative-quantitative, through empirical social research, composed of three stages. The first will be the collection of data from secondary sources (SNIS, WHO, IBGE and others), the second will be the field research (observation, interviews, and statistical and thematic analysis of the data) and the last will be the triangulation of the data, which it consists in the effective comparison between the analyzed speeches and the quantitative data of the secondary sources.