1000th master’s student enrols in Global Sanitation Graduate School
This week, just five years after the IHE Delft developed, accredited and launched a post-graduate sanitation curriculum, the 1000th master’s student enrolled in the Global Sanitation Graduate School (GSGS). The GSGS embraces a group of 55 educational institutions in 22 countries that adopted the curriculum. Its students come from 52 countries in South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.
Thanks to recent developments, even more students now have access to the curriculum: In September, the taught part of the programme went online as an open access courseware. The GSGS now offers individual on-campus and online courses, full MSc courses, and Graduate Professional Diploma Programmes. This means students can pick and choose which programme suits their needs best. The full MSc is run at 32 universities - by the end of 2024, that figure will be at least 40.
Through its Netherlands-based on-campus sanitation education, IHE Delft reaches about 20-30 sanitation master’s students per year; the GSGS initiative has made the curriculum accessible to many more. As these graduates embark on their careers in sanitation, the Global Sanitation Graduate School has significantly accelerated progress towards Sustainable Development Goal SDG6, which calls for universal access to clean water and sanitation, and to SDG4, which calls for inclusive and equitable quality education.
“IHE Delft and partners have spearheaded the field of sanitation education – making the Institute and GSGS a true SDG accelerator,” said Damir Brdjanovic, IHE Delft Professor of City-wide Inclusive Sanitation, who lead the development and implementation of GSGS.
“IHE Delft and partners have spearheaded the field of sanitation education – making the Institute and GSGS a true SDG accelerator,”
Citywide Inclusive Sanitation
As well as being open access, the GSGS programme is inclusive and diverse: IHE Delft offers support to partners who want to adopt and adapt the courses to suit their own local contexts. The introduction of the Citywide Inclusive Sanitation (CWIS) approach has broadened the traditional, technology-oriented curriculum, to include non-technical solutions such as social, cultural, behavioural, leadership, governance, financial, and gender aspects – making its sanitation courses more attractive to a broader audience and even more importantly, relevant to the Global South. The GSGS is also on track to achieve its goal of at least half women students.
IHE Delft students following the curriculum as part of the MSc in Water and Sustainable Development often do some of their research in the Institute’s faecal sludge laboratory – one of only dozen in the world capable of analyzing a wide spectre of parameters from faecal sludge and septic sludge samples.
The GSGS is supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and managed by IHE Delft Institute for Water Education.
Damir Brdanovic
Professor of Citywide Inclusive Sanitation