Print
Email
Updated May 17, 2011 14:31:59
Water, Sanitation and Hygiene, together known as 'WASH', continue to be a daily problem for people hundreds of millions of people throughout the developing world.
A 'WASH' conference is underway in Brisbane Australia, bringing together leaders including UNICEF and the World Bank, to discuss the challenges of providing sustainable access to safe water and basic sanitation services. The latest figures show roughly one in eight people, or nearly 900 million people, around the world do not have access to safe water.
Presenter: Cameron Wilson
Speaker: Clarissa Brocklehurst, Chief of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene with the United Nations Children's Fund
Listen:
Windows Media
WILSON: Now you're describing this as a crisis around the world. Why do you use the term crisis?
BROCKLEHURST: I think the reason we use the term crisis is just because of the number of people and the impact that poor water and sanitation and hygiene has. You just quoted the figure for water supply, 900 million without water supply, but the figures for sanitation are even more chilling, two-point-six billion people around the world don't have access to improved sanitation facilities, and of those one-point-one billion practice what we euphemistically call "open defecation". And the impact on health is stunning. As the head of WASH in the United Nations Childrens Fund we were particularly at the impact on children, and there are millions of child deaths every year from something as simple as diarrhoea which is caused by children growing up in a fecally contaminated environment. So we're seeing the impact on child deaths, but we also see an impact for instance on school children who are going to school weakened by diarrhoeal diseases and weakened by worm infestations. So this has an ongoing effect on the economic development of countries.
WILSON: The figures you quote there are huge. Is there a trend one way or another if things are improving or worsening?
BROCKLEHURST: With water supply the trend is good. In fact for water supply it's one of the few areas in which we're on track to meet the Millennium Development Goals. The problem is that the figures overall hide the fact that some regions are lagging behind. So whereas some regions have been able to make incredible progress in water supply, East Asia is a good example of that, there are other areas like sub-Saharan Africa where we're lagging behind in progress. But again for sanitation the trend is not good, we're not on track to meet the targets, and large populous regions like South Asia dominated by India, are way off track. And we're just not seeing enough progress.
WILSON: How much of improving this area is the responsibility of governments and improving the infrastructure?
BROCKLEHURST: I would say totally, and organisations like UNICEF and many of the other agencies who are present at the conference here in Brisbane, our main objective is to support governments. Change in this area is something that has to be led and driven by government. We have to see good government policy, we have to see good government implementation programs, and the theme of this conference is actually sustainability, so we need to see governments both at the national and at the local level taking on the task of keeping systems working once they've been put in.
WILSON: Surely one of the challenges though is to make sure any policies put in place actually have an affect at the ground level?
BROCKLEHURST: Absolutely, I think what we're seeing worldwide is a growing political will to do something about water and sanitation, and we have to be able to translate that will into actual change. And so many of the things that are being discussed here is how we actually do that and what the role is of aid agencies and support agencies, and we help that to happen without actually taking on all the burden ourselves of trying to install things in communities.
WILSON: So a huge problem by the sound of things, are there any easy starting points, can you aim at things like re-education to get over some of these problems?
BROCKLEHURST: Yes and one of the things that is being discussed in today's sessions is the incredible power of behaviour change, and many of us are turning our attention very much to the kinds of things that trigger behaviour change. I think it's interesting because we see some parallels here within our own societies, the type of work that is being done to change behaviour around smoking for instance. We have to do the same kinds of things to help people understand why it's so important to do simple things like hand washing with soap or building a household toilet and then having all members of the family use it. So part of this conference is not just talking about the technology side, but also the science of behaviour change and how people's brains actually work.
WILSON: Is that difficult if you have a community that for years has had a certain amount of facilities and things change, is it difficult to convince them to change?
BROCKLEHURST: Yes any kind of behaviour change is difficult and coming back to my parallel with smoking I think anybody would realise that that has been a huge challenge. Changing ingrained behaviour, changing social norms is always difficult, and in many places in the world, certainly among the poor, the social norm of open defecation has existed for many years. So we have to explain to people why they need to change their behaviour, what's in it for them, what they're going to gain, and then actually help them go through that process of changing behaviour.
WILSON: Really when you come right down to it, how much of this just comes down to the fact that there are people that don't have the money, there's not the money there to improve the situation?
BROCKLEHURST: I think one of the things we're talking about is the fact that money may be an obstacle but it is not the only obstacle by any means. And we're hearing reports of huge progress in sanitation using methods that trigger people to want sanitation, to want to give up open defecation, and then to spend very small amounts of money to build humble latrines using local materials. In cases where in actual fact you can get around the affordability question by helping people to build toilets made out of the same kinds of materials that their houses for instance. But we're also talking about how you can strategically provide people with the help that they need, not with large infrastructure subsidies, but perhaps with smaller amounts of targetted subsidy. And also we're talking about how you can get the private sector involved to get entrepreneurs to help them realise the huge market which exists for something like sanitation, and then enter that market with very affordable products. So it's not just a matter of saying people are poor and therefore they need money to do this, we're looking at the problem in a much more nuanced way.
WILSON: But where have you seen some success stories there where people have made real improvements with minimal expense?
BROCKLEHURST: Bangladesh is a good example, it's a country where an approach called community-led total sanitation was born, and it has achieved rapid increases in sanitation coverage among both poor and non-poor. There are other countries which are now starting to duplicate those kinds of approaches, and are seeing success. We're also hearing reports from other countries which have been able to really scale up water supply, some countries in which they have focussed on connecting people to piped water supply, then there are other countries that have really focussed on providing lower cost water supply such as hand pumps at least in the interim until they can role out other kinds of services.
No comments:
Post a Comment