A/HRC/18/33 sanitation in schools and hospitals. Poverty reduction strategies and national development plans should also have specific action envisaged on water and sanitation. 18. Specific strategies and plans for water and sanitation will often also be essential to ensure that these issues are accorded sufficient priority and that their specificities are taken into account. These will need to be linked to broader plans and strategies in related sectors to ensure a coherent approach. A sole focus on mainstreaming would bear the risk of diluting the issue and limiting it to rhetorical repackaging. Moreover, it has also been found that strong sectoral planning influences donor prioritization19 and thus can help to increase funding to the sectors. Often overlooked, formulating a specific strategy on sanitation, as has been done in Bangladesh,20 has been shown in many cases to significantly contribute to prioritization of the issue. 19. Existing strong strategies and/or plans for the water and sanitation sectors should be re-examined, revised and fully aligned with human rights standards and principles. Often, such strategies already implicitly include human rights principles such as nondiscrimination – while not necessarily couched in the language of human rights – and can be built upon. Where no such planning exists, or where sanitation and water do not enjoy sufficient priority, the development of a new strategy and/or plan based on the human rights to water and to sanitation will be necessary. III. Phases of planning A. Assessment and diagnosis 20. The development of a strategy and plan for the implementation of the rights to water and to sanitation must be based on a robust situational analysis that enables States to know where they stand both in terms of outcomes as well as inputs to the sectors, including on the status of the realization of the rights to water and to sanitation, on access to safe and affordable water and sanitation, and on funding flows to existing activities, resources and institutional capacities. 21. Bangladesh, for example, is currently in the process of carrying out an assessment regarding the status of sanitation in the country. A national sanitation conference entitled BanglaSan took place in January 2011 and gathered together about 700 representatives of government, non-governmental organizations, experts, elected representatives and professionals. The Government of Bangladesh committed to a carry out a national sanitation census to identify gaps and prepare an action plan that includes the necessary allocations.21 22. The normative content of the rights to water and to sanitation is a good basis for such an assessment. Analysing the current situation will require a detailed understanding of access, and will need to go beyond currently reported information, for example, in the framework of the monitoring of the Millennium Development Goals. Often, existing information from censuses, demographic surveys and samples is not as detailed, targeted and disaggregated as would be required for a thorough assessment based on human rights 19 20 21 UN-Water and WHO, GLAAS 2010 (note 9 above), p. 22. See Bangladesh, National Sanitation Strategy (2005). Available from www.dphe.gov.bd/pdf/MR11_SanitationStrategy.pdf. See www.wsscc.org/resources/resource-news-archive/banglasan-participants-hear-governmentscommitment-wash. 7