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- Downpours beaten
- Lead law' update
- Reality check
- On the hunt
- Health check
- Survey results
- Fire goes green
- Double dipping
- Flow reduction
- UK farming misery
- Bugs eating through fat
- 'Super' solution
- Luxury goes green
- O2 overcomes, too
- Norway shows the way
- Dubai: Changing landscape
- Harsh environment
- Democracy brings water
- Government leads the way
- Extracting oil from stand
- Heat Pumps: The new era
- Sao Paulo's hotel unique
- Masquerading dummies
- Testing times 'down-under'
- iFlush: The digital revolution
- Much more to good design
- New lead policy
- India's modern sanitation
- Fire suppression systems
- From Hutong to high-rise
- Attracting woman engineers
- Contemplating the future
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Bad water kills more children than war.
One of the best illustrations of the
divide between rich and poor
nations is the designation of
2008 as the International Year of Sanitation
by the United Nations General Assembly.
The international year aims to highlight
the need for urgent action on behalf of the
more than 40% of the world’s population who
continue to live without improved sanitation.
Lack of proper sanitation contributes to
the deaths of thousands of men, women and
children every day from largely preventable
causes, including diarrhoeal diseases.
Though more than 1.2 billion people
worldwide gained access to improved
sanitation between 1990 and 2004, an
estimated 2.6 billion people - including 980
million children – have yet to be reached.
This is one of the single biggest development
challenges facing the world.
The International Year of Sanitation 2008
was established to accelerate progress
towards meeting the Millennium Development
Goal of reducing by half the proportion of
people living without access to improved
sanitation by 2015. In addition, progress on
sanitation will contribute to the achievement
of all the Millennium development Goals.
Improved sanitation includes clean, safe
toilets, wastewater management and hygiene
promotion, all of which prevent the transfer
of pathogens in human excreta. When not
treated safely, these elements adversely
affect health, often depriving children of an
education, and impede social and economic
development.
The absence of improved sanitation in
schools is an underlying factor in absenteeism
and poor classroom performance due to
illness, low enrolment and early dropout from
school, especially for girls whose parents
may remove them from the education system when they start menstruating.
Lack of toilets exposes women and girls
to violence and abuse, as some females are
able to defecate only after nightfall and in
secluded areas. Proper sanitation, including
hand-washing with soap, averts the spread
of diarrhoeal disease, which is the second
biggest killer of children under five.
Improving sanitation leads to improved
health, dignity, and social and economic
development, protects the environment and
helps people break the cycle of poverty.
The year will include major regional
conferences on sanitation to share best
practices and help accelerate progress,
including those that focus on school
sanitation. It will also help encourage public
and private partnerships to help tap
into the comparative strengths of each
sector, advocate and raise awareness on
sanitation, gain additional funding and
develop country-level plans of action.
Additionally, many activities and events
were planned inside and outside the UN
system surrounding Sanitation and Hygiene
Week (15-21 March) and World Water Day
(22 March). One such event was UN Water’s
observance of World Water Day (this year
to be celebrated as World Sanitation Day),
which took place in Geneva on 14 March
and was co-organized by UNICEF, the World
Health Organization and the Water Supply and
Sanitation Collaborative Council.
We tend to forget how similar sanitation
difficulties were overcome in 19th century
London.
In a recent article in The Guardian by
economics editor Larry Elliott, he noted how
Charles Dickens would have felt at home in
the streets of today’s Dhaka.
As in Victorian times, the shanty towns
of Bangladesh’s capital reek of excrement
dropped from makeshift hanging toilets
perched precariously on bamboo stilts a
couple of meters above the mire.
However, as Elliott so rightly points out, sanitation is such a low priority that when
the UN drew up its original list of Millennium
Development Goals to be achieved by 2015,
what did not feature was the goal of ensuring
that children of slum dwellers in Dhaka could
go to the toilet without endangering their lives.
In the west we take clean water and
sanitation for granted. Supplying septic tanks
and u-bends to Third World countries has
never had the emotional appeal of helping
starving babies, HIV/Aids patients and
children desperate to go to school.
Let us hope that this 2008 focus on
sanitation makes some real advances on
situations such as that in Dhaka – though
there are cities and countries in equally bad
shape the world over.
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