Maravi

Access to safe water and sanitation

Access to safe water and sanitation
By The Post
Wed 23 Mar. 2011, 04:00 CAT

Marking the United Nations World Water Day under the theme “Water for cities: responding to the urban challenge”, we were reminded by Paul Kapotwe, country representative from WaterAid in Zambia, that “with the rapidly growing urban population lacking clean water and toilets, the developing world is facing a massive public health crisis.

Half of our country’s population lives in urban and peri-urban areas. Statistics show that Zambia’s population with access to safe drinking water is only 43 per cent. And only 23 per cent of our population has access to safe sanitation.

This is so despite commendable investment programmes being implemented with the support of donor agencies during and after the International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade.

The past two decades have seen the passing of an unprecedented number of declarations seeking to ensure that the great majority of our people have access to safe water and sanitation .

Yet to date, the great majority of our people do not have even the most basic levels of access to safe drinking water and sanitation.

Why is this so? Is it because there is no money for our government to provide these services to the great majority of our people? Yes, this can be so because our country doesn’t have much money.

But there is much more to this than just money.

Although the lack of financial resources is a factor, the key constraint to providing water to the great majority of our people is the political decision to implement the rights of our people.

And this is why those advocating the inclusion of socioeconomic rights in our Constitution do not want to compromise on such issues and are seeking a rights-based approach to these problems.

They believe every citizen has a basic right to safe drinking water and therefore, it should be a responsibility of government to ensure that every citizen has access to safe drinking water.

It is unacceptable that in the 21st century only 50 per cent of our people have access to safe drinking water and only 23 per cent have access to safe sanitation.

This is both morally and practically unacceptable. Water is life, so it is said.

Truly, water has always been an important and life-sustaining drink to humans and essential to the survival of all organisms. Water constitutes approximately 70 per cent of the human body by mass.

It is a crucial component of the metabolic processes and serves as a solvent for many bodily solutes.

Therefore, every person, whether rich or poor, should have access to safe drinking water and sanitation.

One cannot claim to uphold the sanctity of life if there is no provision for the minimal access to safe drinking water and sanitation for all.

Waterborne diseases cause many deaths each year because people lack proper drinking water and safe sanitation.

Over 90 per cent of deaths from diarrhoeal diseases in our country today occur in children less than five years old.

Malnutrition, especially protein energy malnutrition, can decrease children’s resistance to infections, including water related diarrhoeal diseases.

We can’t continue to lose so many children when improved water supply can easily reduce diarrhoea morbidity.

Our children are dying every day from causes that could be easily prevented if their families had easy access to safe drinking water and to a toilet that is built well enough to protect them from contact with human waste and the diseases that it carries.

Poor water and sanitation and unsafe hygiene practices are the main causes of diarrhoea. In addition to illness and death, lack of safe water and sanitation has many other serious repercussions for children.

Well too often, girls are forced to skip classes to go and draw water, resulting in loss of critical time for learning.

Clearly, improved water and sanitation services are a prerequisite for child survival and development.

And that is why they are a key component of the millennium development goals.

We know that throughout most of the world, the most common contamination of raw water sources is from sewage and in particular faecal pathogens and parasites.

It is clear that our people need to have access to good quality water in sufficient quantities, water purification technology and availability and distribution systems for water.

At the rate we are going, it will not be possible for us to achieve the millennium development goal of halving the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water by 2015.

We seem to be facing serious challenges in this goal.

Our rural communities are the furthest from meeting the 2015 millennium development goal on safe drinking water and sanitation.

Water and sanitation are services that no responsible government can ignore.

There is nothing which makes people more appreciative of a government than that it is able to deliver safe drinking water and sanitation to them.

It is therefore the task of our government to give the millions of Zambians an essential piece of dignity in their lives – the dignity that comes from having access to clean running water and safe sanitation.

Labels: IGNATIUS CHAMA, WATER, WORLD WATER DAY

posted by MrK @ 4:54 AM