Maravi

Water and sanitation

Water and sanitation
By Editor
Thursday March 20, 2008 [03:00]

Every year, unsafe water and lack of basic sanitation and hygiene claim many lives of our children under five years old from diarrhoea. This tragic reality underscores the need for us to commit ourselves to meeting the Millennium Development Goal of water and sanitation – to halve, by 2015, the proportion of our people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation.

But those who die are no means the only children affected. Many more have their development disrupted and their health undermined by diarrhoea or water-related diseases.

In all, many of our people do not have access to drinking water from improved sources, and many are without basic sanitation – yet these foundations for healthy living are taken for granted by the majority of our people. And as local government and housing minister Sylvia Masebo has observed, many of our people don’t feel comfortable to discuss the topic of water and sanitation or toilets.

These issues often make some of our people uncomfortable. Even the media’s coverage of these issues is relatively very low.
Water and sanitation are vital in themselves, but they are also key prerequisites for reducing child and maternal mortality and combating diseases.

They are also key to reducing child under-nutrition and achieving universal primary education. Girls, especially, are likely to spend more time in school when they spend less time fetching water and when adequate sanitation facilities are available on school grounds.

The benefits of improved drinking water and sanitation are evident and could be extended to so many more of our people, if only sufficient resources and resolve were dedicated to the task.

It is hard to think of a more potent reason to redouble our efforts than the thought of the many of our children, who every year, will not live to see their fifth birthday.

Water is as fundamental to human life as the air we breathe. Yet, ironically, this essence of life can have an injurious impact if its source is not free from pollution and infection – and the most likely pollutant is human faeces that have not been disposed of and have spread because of lack of basic sanitation and hygiene.

Young children are more vulnerable than any other age group to the ill effects of unsafe water, insufficient quantities of water, poor sanitation and lack of hygiene. Lack of safe water, sanitation and adequate hygiene contribute to the leading killers of our children under-five, including diarrhoea diseases, pneumonia, neo-natal disorders and under-nutrition.

Those children and adults who depend on water from unprotected dug wells, rivers, lakes or streams for drinking are at risk of infection from waterborne diseases if sanitation is poor. Too few of our people enjoy the safety and convenience of having water that has been treated under managed conditions and piped into their homes or compounds.

Many of our people do not have access to improved sanitation. Improved sanitation facilities are those that reduce the chances of people coming into contact with human excreta. These include toilets that flush wastes into a piped sewer, septic tank or pit, as well as dry pit latrines constructed with a cover. Such facilities are only considered to be improved if they are private rather than shared with other households.

The great majority of our people who remain without access to improved drinking water live in rural areas, where journeys to collect water tend to be longer than in urban areas. And the great majority of our rural population must collect water from a communal source and they must collect sufficient amounts not only for drinking but also for cooking and washing needs of the whole family.

They spend more of their time collecting water.
In peri-urban areas and shanty compounds, irregular interrupted supplies may cause residents to wait up to several hours before they can collect water.

The urban-rural divide is not the only disparity evident in access to water and sanitation: the richest quintile is four times more likely to have access to sanitation than the poorest quintile. There is also an associated gender gap.

Women and girls bear more of the consequences of poor water, sanitation and hygiene, as they are usually the ones who fetch the water and care for the children and other household members who fall sick from water-related diseases. In addition, girls’ school attendance is affected the most by inadequate water and sanitation facilities in schools and by time spent travelling long distances to drinking-water sources.

Girls and women need greater privacy for personal hygiene than boys and men. In the absence of private sanitation facilities, there have been cases where women limit their food and water intake so that they can relieve themselves under cover of darkness; yet night-time trips to fields or roadsides may put them at risk of physical attack.

Unsafe water and unhygienic conditions not only have a detrimental effect on the health of our under-fives, but also have an impact on the health, attendance and learning capacities of school-age children.

Let us ensure that all our schools have adequate child-friendly water and sanitation facilities, along with hygiene-education programmes.

We should emphasise sanitation in our schools as a priority action. We shouldn’t forget that providing adequate water and sanitation in our schools is essential if the enrolment, learning and retention of girls is to improve.

Let us meditate deeply on these issues today as we commemorate World Water Day whose theme this year is ‘sanitation’.

Again, let us not forget that water is as fundamental to human life as the air we breathe; it is the essence of life and we should keep it free from pollution and infection. Water and sanitation are vital in themselves.

Labels: LOCAL GOVERNMENT, SYLVIA MASEBO

posted by MrK @ 3:50 PM