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Sanitation: Water`s abandoned child, causes havoc
2008-03-16 10:01:31
By Deo mfugale
In one of the meetings on water that I attended recently, a speaker talked about the relationship between water and sanitation.
He said while water is the mother, sanitation is the offspring which, however, has been abandoned and, as a reaction, the latter is causing a lot of havoc through waterborne diseases.
The relationship might be far fetched but the reality is that the world pays more attention to clean and safe water supply than sanitation.
No wonder millions of children in the world die from diseases arising from poor sanitation, deaths which could be prevented.
That governments do not give sanitation the attention it requires, is reflected in the administrative structure itself.
In Tanzania, for example, we have the Ministry of Water whose function, among other things, is to ensure adequate supply of clean and safe water and protection of water sources. Sanitation doesn’t feature prominently in the ministry’s set up.
Councils- town, district, municipal and city councils- are charged with overseeing the issues of sanitation through their various authorities but even then, these authorities focus their attention on water supply, not sanitation. No one owns up the responsibility to provide adequate sanitation particularly to urban residents.
At the world level, the neglect for sanitation is equally conspicuous.
Today, only five percent of investments are dedicated to water…..,`` noted Loic Fauchon, President of the World Water Council, during the Fourth World Water Forum in Mexico last year.
He made no mention of financial allocations or investments made in sanitation. Yet it is quite clear that water and sanitation are inseparable.
According to the Water Resources Development Report for Africa, while 300 million people in the continent lack access to safe water, 313 million have no access to latrines and other sanitation facilities.
At the world level, one billion people have no access to clean drinking water against 2.6 billion people who have no proper sanitation.
WHO estimates that more than two million people around the word, mostly children, die from diseases associated with lack of safe drinking water and inadequate sanitation.
The UN Secretary General`s Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation says that the world is off track for achieving the goal of sanitation in each of the three aspects: hygiene promotion, household sanitary arrangements and sewage treatment.
Thus the UN has declared 2008 the International Year of Sanitation (IYS) so as to raise political awareness and concerted actions towards placing sanitation on track.
As part of activities to mark the IYS, the African Ministers` Council on Water (AMCOW) has announced a high-level regional conference to specifically focus on the challenge of sanitation and hygiene programmes in the continent.
The Conference scheduled for March 18 to 20, 2008 in Durban, South Africa will be a key activity to mark the global International Year of Sanitation, which was launched on November 21 last year in New York.
The conference would also review efforts to reduce by half, the number of people without access to basic sanitation and hygiene by 2015.
Sub-Saharan Africa has the lowest sanitation coverage, with only 60 percent of the African population having access to improved sanitation services.
The continent needs to increase coverage to more than 221 million un-served people to meet the 2015 sanitation target date.
Accelerating actions for achieving the sanitation MDG will have positive impact on public health, poverty reduction, economic and social development, and the environment.
Deodatus Mfugale is the Features Editor, The Guardian. deofunga@yahoo.com
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