United Nations wants more work on water and sanitaton
Updated
It's estimated that two-point-six billion people around the world do not have access to basic sanitation facilities - the United Nations describes this as a hidden global scandal.
Presenter: Geraldine Coutts
Speaker: Clarissa Brocklehurst, Chief of the Water, Environment and Sanitation Programs for the United Nation's Children's Fund UNICEF
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CLARISSA BROCKLEHURST: The reason that the 3-part acronym - Water, Sanitation and Hygiene - are so important for us is that, in the past, there's been a lot of focus on the water side of this - that, you know, everybody needs water and that projects should emphasise on providing people with water. But what we've learned through bitter experience is that if you ignore the sanitation and the hygiene part of the equation, you, in fact, do not get the impact that you want. And, particularly in this, the International Year of Sanitation, the importance of sanitation is becoming much more apparent. And the medical data show us that children and, in fact, adults can't thrive in an environment that is faecally contaminated. This will lead to constant infection from diarrhoeal diseases, from worm infections. And so we absolutely have to do something about sanitation. The other thing that we're learning is that hygiene and personal handwashing is one of the most cost-effective interventions that we can do. Handwashing controls an enormous number of diseases - not just the diarrhoeal diseases but also upper-respiratory-tract infections. We're seeing new evidence that shows that it can contribute to the survival of children just after birth if midwives have washed their hands. So, handwashing is becoming a bigger and bigger part of our program. It's not very sexy; it's just very ordinary. It's about teaching people. But we believe that it has potential to have a huge impact over the next few years if we could raise rates of handwashing.
GERALDINE COUTTS: If we could get into just a little bit of detail with the wash programs. Only in 90 countries, I think - only; that's a lot, 90 countries - but I want to unpack that a little bit just to find out, globally, how we're doing in terms of sanitation and water, and maybe pick some examples.
CLARISSA BROCKLEHURST: So, globally, there's good news and bad news. The good news is that the world is on track to reach the millennium development goal target for water supply, and that millennium development goal target is to have the proportion of people without water supply by 2015. So, one thing to bear in mind when we talk about the MDG targets is the fact that it still leaves a lot of people unserved. But, still, these were important targets that were set a few years ago that many countries are using to inspire them to new momentum. And the overall news for water supply is good. We're on track to meet that target. The bad news is that we're way off track to meet the target for sanitation. So, for instance, now there are fewer than a billion people in the world who don't have water supply, but there are more than 2.5 billion people in the world who don't have sanitation, don't have access to what we call 'improved sanitation facilities'. So, the data tells us that we really need to catch up on our work in sanitation.
GERALDINE COUTTS: Now, you mention the word 'trends' there and you mentioned earlier that you're winning the war - well, not winning the war - that the water implementation programs is better than the sanitation. Are they the trends? But...
CLARISSA BROCKLEHURST: I'm always good at good news and bad news, so I'm afraid there's bad news in the water supply story as well. When we disaggregate the data and look at urban versus rural, what we see quite quickly is that the high rates of water supply that we're seeing are largely being driven by the fact that urban areas in the world have relatively high rates of water supply. If we look at the rural data, we see a different story. Many of the rural areas of the world are lagging behind badly in terms of water supply and are not on track to meet the MDG. So, there's a story there that sanitation lags behind water and that rural lags behind urban in both water and sanitation.
