Call for Governmental Cooperation to Solve Global Water Crisis

During the annual Water Week conference in Stolkholm, a report was given by the World Bank's water and sanitation programme (WSP) that said that the water supply coverage across thirty-two developing countries has risen by 13 percent between 1990 and 2008 and that sanitation coverage has increased by 11 percent. The conference ended by calling on governments participating in the Rio+20 summit in June 2012 to make strides in achieving "universal provisioning of safe drinking water, adequate sanitation, and modern energy services by 2020" to further increase improvements that are underway.



Water and sanitation improvement can be seen as an unglamorous problem to focus on when compared to building schools and hospitals in resource-poor areas. However, every $1 spent on sanitation can provide up to $9 in economic benefit. The improvement in basic health needs gives a person more energy to participate in the economy and make an effort to obtain an education.



According to the WSP, two factors are needed to increase the progress of water and sanitation access: one, mechanisms are needed to convert funding into something that can be used on-the-ground and two, funding also needs to be increased in order to overcome annual shortfalls.



Success is dependent on governments, NGOs, and financial institutions coming together with a shared vision. According to the UN's Green Economy Report, annual investment of $198 billion or 0.16% of the world's GDP is enough to to increase access to water and basic sanitation by two-fold over the next four years.



-Chelsey Dambro



Source: Guardian.co.uk

Gates Foundation's New Sanitation Program Focus: The Toliet

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced recently that it will invest more money into improving sanitation services in poor countries around the world.

$42 million dollars will be added to an ever increasing budget that aims to encourage innovation and focus on a basic human need that is oftentimes overlooked. Even the original eight Millennium Goals drawn up by the UN back in 2000 did not include improvement of sanitation.

However, sanitation is a big problem. An estimated 2.6 billion people lack access to safe sanitation. One billion people defecate openly. Diarrhea is the number one killer of children in Africa, which can easily change if sanitary practices are improved. If we keep going at our current rate, by 2049 only 77 percent of the world population will have flushable toilets.

"No innovation in the past 200 years has done more to save lives and improve health than the sanitation revolution triggered by the invention of the toilet. But it did not go far enough. It only reached one-third of the world. What we need are new approaches, new ideas. In short, we need to reinvent the toilet," said Sylvia Matthews Burwell recently at a conference in Rwanda.

Already progress has been made on innovating the toilet along with other new sanitation technologies. Designs are in progress to develop waterless toilets that don't rely on sewer connections. Companies are coming up with hygienic ways to empty pits and process waste.

To make sanitation practices worthwhile, new technology has to be both relevant to the community and implementable in a cheap fashion. Ultimately, improving conditions at the very basic level of community life, such as sanitation, will impact other needs that operate at a higher level such as education, health, and economic standing.

-Chelsey Dambro

Source: Guardian.co.uk

Good Sanitation Can Save Thousands Of Lives

Most of the time people ignore the matter of proper sanitation as it is an unglamorous issue. I mean who wants to talk about sanitation if issues like hunger and health are around? But good hygiene can save thousands of lives by reducing the amount of deaths from diarrhea. Children under five around the world are the most vulnerable to poor hygiene and inadequate sanitation, two of the major causes of diarrhoea. According to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the disease kills at least 1.2 million children under five each year, but with proper sanitation cases of diarrhoea in children under five can be reduced by a third.

In order to ensure the well-being of millions of people around the world, the United Nations launched the program “Sustainable sanitation: The Five-Year-Drive to 2015” yesterday as part of its goal of halving the proportion of the population without access to basic sanitation by 2015. The main message of the new drive is that sanitation is vital for health, brings dignity, equality and safety, represents a good economic investment and sustains clean environments.

Access to sanitation has been recognized by the UN as a human right, a basic service required to live a normal life. It can be noted that, some 2.6 billion people – or half the population in the developing world – still lack access to good sanitation. The drive will call for an end to open defecation, the most dangerous sanitation practice for public health which is being practiced by over 1.1 billion people worldwide.

-Nisha Noor

SOURCE: UN NEWS CENTRE

World Toilet Day

November 19th is World Toilet Day, a day designed to bring awareness to the growing problem of water sanitation. Over 2.6 billion people lack their basic sanitation needs, leading to many problems that are easily preventable. Moreover, water sanitation, while affecting many more people than HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, or malaria, does not receive the attention from aid groups that it needs.

Throughout the world, people are hosting events to educate others on the importance of water sanitation. Many people do not realize that water sanitation affects nearly every nation - even nations such as India and China, which possess the finances and technology for water sanitation, are hindered by a culture that does not see the importance of toilets and other tools. Recently, a grass-roots campaign in India has encouraged women to only marry men who can provide a toilet - using sex/marriage as a way to modify the culture in a way that encourages proper sanitation practices. Some women want a car - Indian women want a toilet.

- Corey Cox

SOURCE: World Toilet Day

Improved Sanitation Could Prevent More than 2 Million Child Deaths a Year

A new series of studies on sanitation reveals that unsafe sanitation and drinking water results in nearly 20 percent of all child deaths in the world and at least 7 percent of disease across the world. The studies, published in the Public Library of Science (PLoS) Medicine Journal, found that this year 2.6 billion people, including over one billion children, lack basic sanitation, two-thirds of which live in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Furthermore, at any given time nearly half of the urban populations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America have a disease linked to poor sanitation and hygiene.

The progress to improve access to better sanitation has been slow due to lack of national policies that establish clear institutional responsibilities, and population growth in urban areas of developing countries. Despite these constraints, international donors, United Nations agencies, and developing country governments can reduce this global disease burden. The Millennium Development Goal sanitation target calls for the amount of people living without access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation to be halved by 2015 from levels in 2000.

Although the main goal of improving sanitation is health, there are also social and economic benefits. Some of the main motivators for sanitation adoption among householders in developing countries are spurred by the desire for privacy, wanting to be modern, and avoiding embarrassment. In addition, for women, household sanitation reduces the risk of rape or attack when using public latrines, and for girls, school sanitation facilities results in fewer days missed from school due to staying at home during menstruation.

The economic benefits of improved sanitation could save some $7 billion dollars per year in health care costs and attribute to greater overall GDP due to a greater number of deaths averted. Furthermore, there would be fewer days lost at work or school due to illness or caring for an ill relative. The cost-benefit ratios of achieving the MDG sanitation target shows that every one dollar spent on sanitation generates about ten dollars worth of economic benefit, mainly by gains in productivity from not being ill.

The involvement of international policy is crucial to accelerating the achievement of universal access to safe drinking water, improved sanitation and hygiene. Paul Hunter, a leader of one of the PLoS studies, writes, “We know enough now about the importance of improved water supply, sanitation, and hygiene ... to consider universal access to these services to be an urgent imperative."

- Martina Georgieva

SOURCE: Reuters , PLoS Collections

An App To Purify Water?

When water pumps are installed by various nonprofit development groups (including the United Nations), they tend to break within about a decade. According to Ned Breslin, CEO of the group Water For People, a substantial percentage, roughly 30 to 45 percent, of water pumps break within a decade. That’s why Water For People has created a smartphone app, called Flow, that lets people in the developing world snap pictures of water pumps that are broken, and hopefully connect with experts around the world who can fix these pumps.

Here is how the app works: Using Android cell phone technology and Google Earth software, FLOW provides anyone with crucial data for projects supported by Water For People. Community members, industry professionals, and volunteers gather data with an Android phone. At the touch of a button, data flows to the Internet and updates the status of a water point or sanitation solution on Google Maps and Google Earth.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) call for a reduction of the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water by half between 1990 and 2015. Call your congressional leaders to cosponsor the Water for the World Act if they haven’t already! Take action and make universal access to safe drinking water possible!

-Clare O.

SOURCE: CNN

African Development Bank Gives Tanzania Money for Water

On September 15, the Board of Directors of the African Development Bank (AfDB) approved $98 million to go towards a Tanzanian program focused on increasing rural water supplies. Tanzania's long-term development plan was implemented to meet the MDGs in 2001. The first phase of the water project is already completed. It provided 8,250 operational water points serving 1.9 million people. Another part of the program involved building 370 demonstration latrines, through which 1.5 million people were educated about sanitation and hygiene.

The program is designed to sustainably improve health and quality of life for rural Tanzanians. Before implementation, half of all Tanzanians did not have access to a safe water supply. Those who did often had to walk long distances, negatively impacting economic development. Tanzania's aggressive program will reduce the spread of waterborne illness, help with poverty eradication, provide safe drinking water to almost 5 million people, and 10 million will benefit from the sanitation and hygiene program. Go Tanzania!

-Erica Stetz

SOURCE: African Development Bank