Erratic water supplies mean women in urban Zimbabwean cities, like Bulawayo, need to fetch water from water points. Studies have shown that while water, sanitation and hygiene are a women’s domain, they are not involved in water management. Credit: Ignatius Banda/IPS

By Ignatius Banda
Bulawayo, ZIMBABWE , Oct 19 2021 (IPS)

Each morning, Langelihle Tshuma checks her taps to confirm the water supply before preparing for the day ahead.

Despite living in the city, the married housewife and mother of four has become accustomed to what in most cities would be considered an essential service.

“We are used to it now,” she said, referring to water cuts in Zimbabwe’s second city of Bulawayo.

Water availability has become erratic in the city, with no clear schedule or fixed timetable to warn residents about when to expect dry faucets.

Tshuma joins scores of other residents to look for the nearest water point or the next house with a borehole in what is considered a middle-class suburb.

“It used to be kind of humiliating walking around the neighbourhood with buckets looking for water, but when you have young children, you learn humility to soldier on,” Tshuma told IPS.

While her experience is commonplace in this city of about 2 million people according to some estimates, it is but a microcosm of a global trend where women’s unpaid work includes fetching water, with women being left out in crucial decisions regarding water access, experts say.

There are concerns among researchers and experts that water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) issues have for years been regarded as a woman’s domain in developing countries, but that has not been reflected in the management of water resources.

A report launched last month by the Global Water Partnership (GWP) supported by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) says women remain excluded from global water management despite women being primary water decision-makers at the household level.

According to the research findings in the report titled Advancing towards gender mainstreaming in water resources management, “when women are involved in the management of water resources, their communities achieve much better outcomes, improved water systems and economic and environmental benefits.”  The research canvassed 23 countries.

The GWP notes that while women’s role in Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) was recognized three decades ago by the UN, there has been little progress as the sector remains male-dominated.

“Half of all countries reported limited or no achievement of gender objectives in their water management policies and plans,” said Darío Soto-Abril, Executive Secretary of Global Water Partnership (GWP).

“While some reasons for this low number might be a lack of robust data collection and monitoring tools, the number is still low enough for us to say: it’s past time for things to change,” Soto-Abril said.

As women such as Tshuma struggle to access and remain excluded from the decisions that bring water to their homes, experts note that gender mainstreaming is crucial to ensure commitment at the highest political levels for policy commitments is backed up by action.

“If there is good news, it is that there’s been a slight improvement compared to the baseline in 2017,” said Joakim Harlin, UNEP’s chief of Freshwater Ecosystems.

“The ability to integrate gender considerations in water policies is not related exclusively to levels of development – it’s also a question of having the political will to change cultural norms,” Harlin said.

Cultural norms have embedded the images of women and not men fetching water in urban municipalities of many developing countries.

“Women have been cast in roles as water carriers instead of water managers,” the GWP research notes.

“In many developing countries, women are the de facto water decision-makers in households. Research suggests that when women are involved in the management of water resources, their communities achieve better economic and environmental benefits. As the world’s population grows and climate change intensifies water scarcity, women are key to providing more sustainable access to this finite resource,” the report adds.

However, more still needs to be done along with increasing women’s participation in decision-making positions in line with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), says Liza Debevec, Senior Gender and Social Inclusion Specialist at the Global Water Partnership.

“It is not just about increasing women’s representation in councils and committees or coming up with a new general legal framework on gender protection, however important those actions are,” Debevec said.

“It is also about integrating gender issues in all policies in a cross-cutting manner, linking water to other relevant policy areas,” she said.

However, political will is seen as central to ensuring women are involved in policy-making decisions regarding water resources in line with the Integrated Water Resources Management Support Programme under Sustainable Development Goal 6 (SDG6), which seeks clean water for all.

“Political will is urgent. At the top political level, we need a strong commitment to gender mainstreaming, or we’ll be swimming upstream,” Soto-Abril told IPS.

“Political will makes the practical actions successful. Some countries need more data, so they need to do a gender analysis. Others need to financially support the implementation of gender-sensitive practices and introduce accountability mechanisms,” she said.

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Many people living on the banks of rivers in the Amazon rainforest live in stilt houses over the water. Water into which garbage and other waste is dumped – the same water that is used for human consumption, with important consequences on their health, whose magnitude was underlined by the Covid pandemic. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
RÍO DE JANEIRO, Oct 8 2021 (IPS)

Basic sanitation, a sector that is undervalued because, according to politicians, it does not bring in votes, has gained relevance in Brazil due to the pandemic that has hit the poor especially hard and the drought that threatens millions of people.

Brazil has made very little progress in sewerage construction in the last decade. In 2010, only 45.4 percent of the population had sewer service, a proportion that rose to 54.1 percent in 2019. Access to treated water increased from 81 to 83.7 percent in the same period.

During that time, however, hospitalisations due to waterborne diseases decreased by 54.7 percent, from 603,623 to 273,403, according to the study “Sanitation and Waterborne Diseases” by the Trata Brasil Institute, released on Oct. 5 in the city of São Paulo.

Among children under four, who represent 30 percent of the patients requiring hospital admission, the reduction was slightly more pronounced, 59.1 percent.

“The data make it clear that any improvement in the public’s access to drinking water, collection and treatment of wastewater results in great benefits to public health,” the Institute’s president, Édison Carlos, stated in the report.

Covid-19 has underscored the country’s social and economic inequalities by disproportionately affecting the poor, who for one thing are the least likely to have sewerage services.

This is reflected in the distribution of basic sanitation infrastructure by region in Brazil. In the North, only 12.3 percent of the population was served by a sewer system in 2019, the last year data was available from the governmental National Sanitation Information System (SNIS), which served as the basis for the study.

As a result, it is the region with the highest rate of hospitalisations, 22.9 per 10,000 inhabitants. It is also the region that concentrates the country’s most generous water resources, as it is located entirely in the Amazon basin.

But the presence of so many large rivers does not mean the local population has drinking water. In fact only a little more than half of the population has access to clean water.

The result is a high incidence of diarrhea, dengue fever, leptospirosis, schistosomiasis, malaria and yellow fever, all of which are waterborne diseases.

One of the favelas or shantytowns of São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, where local residents have turned a stream into an open-air garbage dump and a source of frequent flooding due to lack of sewage and garbage collection. Nor do favelas in Brazil’s cities have piped water. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

At the other extreme, the Northeast region suffers from water scarcity in most of its semiarid territory. With only 28.3 percent of the local population served by sewer systems and 73.9 percent with access to treated water, it recorded 19.9 cases of hospitalisation per 10,000 inhabitants in 2019.

Part of the progress in sanitation in the region is due to the more than 1.2 million rainwater storage tanks that have been set up in rural areas by the Articulação do Semiárido (ASA), a network of 3,000 social organisations created in 1999.

The semiarid ecoregion, an area of 1,130,000 square kilometres (most of it in the Northeast) that is home to 27 million people, suffered the longest drought on record from 2012 to 2017, and even until 2019 in some parts.

But this time the hunger, violence and exodus to other regions triggered by similar calamities in the past did not occur.

Disparities in health

A comparison of Brazil’s 26 states reveals more alarming disparities. The northeastern state of Maranhão, on the edge of the Amazon rainforest, registered 54.04 hospitalisations per 10,000 inhabitants, far higher than its Amazonian neighbour to the west, Pará, with 32.62.

“Maranhão faces huge challenges in sanitation, as does Pará, but it has higher population density, more people living close together and in contact with dirty water in the open air, for example. Its beaches, often polluted by irregular waste, are another factor to consider,” said Rubens Filho, head of communications at the Trata Brasil Institute and coordinator of its new study.

At the other end of the scale, Rio de Janeiro stands out with the lowest rate of hospitalisations, only 2.84 per 10,000 inhabitants, even though some of its low-income municipalities are among those with the poorest sanitation coverage.

“It is possible that some municipalities do not register cases of waterborne diseases or that people do not seek medical assistance,” Filho told IPS from São Paulo, in an attempt to put the low rate of hospitalisations into context.

“Above and beyond the differences between states, Brazil still has more than 270,000 hospitalisations for preventable diseases; these are costs that could be drastically reduced if everyone had sanitation coverage,” he stressed.

Rainwater harvesting tanks are now part of the landscape in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast, thanks to recent initiatives to help people live with drought. There are some 200,000 tanks for irrigating crops, like those of farmer Abel Manto, and 1.2 million to store drinking water. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

The North and Northeast are the poorest regions in the country, despite the enormous contrast in terms of their ecosystems – rainforest vs semiarid. They are both far from the goal of near universal sanitation in the country by 2033, set by a law – the Legal Framework for Sanitation – passed in 2020.

More precisely, the aim is to bring treated water to 99 percent of the population and sewerage to 90 percent in this enormous country of 213 million people.

The three regions least affected by the lack of such infrastructure, the Midwest, South and Southeast, are suffering this year from the effects of reduced rainfall, apparently due to climate change and no longer to occasional, short-lived droughts.

The low rainfall began in 2020 and since then has caused interruptions in the water supply in cities such as Curitiba, capital of the southern state of Paraná, and an increase in forest fires in the Pantanal, wetlands on the border with Bolivia and Paraguay, and in the southern Amazon jungle.

This year, many cities in the southeastern state of São Paulo began rationing water. In the state capital, São Paulo, and surrounding urban areas, the local sanitation company reduces the pressure in the pipes at night, a measure that prevents leaks but leaves some areas without water.

The fear is that there will be a repeat of the 2014 and 2015 water shortage crisis, which was similar to other shortages that have occurred this century. Twenty years ago a similar drought caused blackouts and ushered in energy rationing for nine months, starting in June 2001.

Brazil depends heavily on rivers for its electricity supply. Even though the proportion was much higher two decades ago, hydroelectric power plants still account for 63 percent of total installed generation capacity.

Reforestation and recovery of springs and headwaters have become part of the country’s sanitation and energy policy.

The frequency of droughts in south-central Brazil confirms the role of the lush Amazon rainforest in increasing rainfall in large areas of this country and neighbouring Argentina and Paraguay.

So-called “flying rivers” carry moisture from the Amazon to South America’s most productive agricultural lands and to watersheds that play a key role in the production of hydroelectricity. But deforestation of the world’s largest tropical forest is taking its toll.

A view of the shantytown in São Bernardo do Campo, the hub of Brazil’s automobile industry, near São Paulo. A common sight in the poor neighbourhoods in Brazil’s cities: unpainted cinderblock houses are stacked on top of each other over streams, into which they dump their debris and garbage. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Lessons learned from Covid-19

Covid-19 has highlighted the urgent need for sanitation. There is a consensus among epidemiologists that the lack of sanitation is one of the factors in the unequal spread and lethality of the coronavirus, to the detriment of the poor, by limiting access to proper hygiene as a preventive measure.

With 598,152 deaths recognised by the Ministry of Health up to Oct. 4, Brazil’s death toll is second only to that of the United States, which counts more than 703,000 deaths due to Covid. But in proportional terms, 280 Brazilians have died per 100,000 inhabitants, compared to 214 in the U.S., according to the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland., which keeps a global record on the pandemic.

The need for improved sanitation infrastructure is also gaining momentum for financial reasons. Brazil’s states, whose governments control the main sanitation companies, see privatisation as a source of revenue to overcome their fiscal imbalance and possibly give the sector a boost.

The 2020 Legal Framework for Sanitation encourages the concession of the service to the private sector as a way to attract investment and meet the goal of near universal coverage.

Companies in four Brazilian states have already been privatised. In Rio de Janeiro, on Apr. 30, 2021, the sanitation services of three of the four areas into which the state was divided will be handed over to private groups for 4.2 billion dollars, 133 percent more than expected.

The fourth area is to be privatised later this year. The 35-year concession requires larger investments than the sums paid for the operation of the services.

Cleaning up rivers, lakes and bays, expanding and repairing the pipeline network, improving water quality and reducing distribution losses, estimated at 41 percent, are tasks that will fall to the new owners.

Julio Esquivel and two children in the La Casita de La Virgen soup kitchen in Villa La Cava stand next to the filter that removes 99.9 percent of bacteria, viruses and parasites, with a capacity of up to 12 liters per hour. The purifier became the starting point for raising awareness in this shantytown on the outskirts of the Argentine capital about access to water as a human right. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Mar 11 2019 (IPS)

“Look at this water. Would you drink it?” asks José Pablo Zubieta, as he shows a glass he has just filled from a faucet, where yellow and brown sediment float, in his home in Villa La Cava, a shantytown on the outskirts of Argentina’s capital.

In La Cava, as in all of Argentina’s slums and shantytowns – known here as “villas” – the connections to the water grid are illegal or informal, and it is very common for homes to be left without service. And when the water does flow, it is generally contaminated.

“If we have money, we buy 20-litre jerry cans for drinking and cooking. If we don’t have enough money, we drink the water we have, although there are entire weeks in which it comes out yellow. I’ve already been intoxicated several times,” Zubieta’s wife, Marcela Mansilla, told IPS, with the resignation of someone who has lived with the same situation for as long as she can remember."The water here comes out with sand and dirt, and it stinks. It's been like this for years and that's why it's common to see kids with pimples, gastroenteritis, diarrhea or worse. In recent years we have had more than 10 cases of tuberculosis and outbreaks of hepatitis." -- Julio Esquivel

At the door of the bare brick house where the couple and their four children live there are some old rusty artifacts, which they picked up in their work as “cartoneros”.

This is the term used in Argentina, for garbage pickers – people excluded from the labour market who every night drag their carts through the streets of the cities and scavenge in search of recyclable materials or other objects that may have some commercial value.

A few meters from where the Zubieta family lives, a community soup kitchen has been operating for 25 years in a single-storey building painted white, where 120 children from La Cava are fed every day and which also functions as a recreational center, with activities aimed at keeping them off the streets.

It is called La Casita de la Virgen and in November 2016, a large blue and red plastic device was installed there, which quickly became very important in the lives of the local residents.

It is a microbiological water purifier designed by a Swiss company that can filter up to 12 litres per hour of contaminated water, eliminating 99.9 percent of bacteria, viruses and parasites.

The equipment, which does not use electricity or batteries and has been distributed in humanitarian crises in different parts of the world, was installed by the Safe Water Project, a social enterprise founded in Buenos Aires in 2015, which promotes immediate and replicable solutions to the problem of access to water.

The residents of La Cava also participate in activities promoted by the company, in which they talk about and discuss their experiences and needs in terms of water, learn about its cycles, and acquire healthy habits to prevent illnesses due to misuse, all of which strengthens their access to water as a human right.

José Pablo Zubieta shows one of the hoses with which the different houses of Villa La Cava make their informal connections to the grid to get water. The service is available a few hours a day but provides contaminated water to this shantytown of 10,000 people north of the Argentine capital. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

The purifier helps ensure clean water to the children who eat in the soup kitchen, who often bring empty bottles or jugs, so they can take home clean water.

The Safe Water Project, which is financed with contributions from companies, state agencies and civil society organisations, is actives in 21 of the country’s 23 provinces and in Uruguay.

Through this collaborative formula, 2,000 families and more than 800 schools and community centres now have access to safe drinking water, reaching around 100,000 people.

“The water here comes out with sand and dirt, and it stinks,” Julio Esquivel, founder and head of the Casita de la Virgen, told IPS. “It’s been like this for years and that’s why it’s common to see kids with pimples, gastroenteritis, diarrhea or worse. In recent years we have had more than 10 cases of tuberculosis and outbreaks of hepatitis.”

“Contaminated water influences health. I’m not a doctor, but it’s easy to see,” adds Esquivel. He is wearing a T-shirt with the image of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, in whose projects to assist the needy he has worked in different cities around the world.

A boy looks at a makeshift drainage channel that runs through Villa La Cava, a slum located in the north of Greater Buenos Aires, in San Isidro, a municipality that blends extreme poverty with luxurious mansions home to some of Argentina’s wealthiest families. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Esquivel is what is known in Catholicism as a consecrated layman: he took a vow of poverty and solidarity with the poor and today lives in a small house in La Cava, the same place where he was born 53 years ago.

“Before they brought us the filter, I tried to boil the water, despite the high cost of the cooking gas, or to add a few drops of bleach to purify it. The filter was a big change for us,” he said.

La Cava is located in San Isidro, one of the 24 municipalities making up Greater Buenos Aires, which has a population of around 14 million people, over one-third of the country’s population.

In the poor suburbs surrounding Buenos Aires, Argentina’s most complex and unequal area, there are 419,401 families living in 1,134 slums, according to official data from 2016. This number marks a phenomenal growth in 15 years: there were 385 villas in 2001, the year of an economic collapse that left hundreds of thousands of people out of work.

A visitor to La Cava, home to more than 10,000 people on some 18 hectares, gets a quick x-ray of Argentina’s social reality: to get to the villa you must first cross tree-lined avenues flanked by walls that protect large mansions, where some of the richest families in Argentina live.

They of course have access to clean piped water, just like in the neighborhoods of Buenos Aires proper.

In La Cava, however, local resident Ramona Navarro told IPS that “people got used to washing clothes and dishes at night, because during the day the water almost never runs.”

Outside a house are seen a cart and some of the odd objects found by garbage pickers, the informal work on which many of the people of La Cava, a shantytown on the north side of Buenos Aires, depend. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

She and her neighbour María Elena Arispe said that on the hottest days of this southern hemisphere summer, in response to people’s protests, the government of the Municipality of San Isidro sent several trucks one afternoon, which distributed two jerry cans of water to each house – barely a bandaid solution for a situation that is as serious as it is chronic.

The trucks can only drive down the main streets of La Cava, which is full of narrow passageways where children and skinny dogs play in the mud that is formed by the un-channeled drains from the houses.

The lack of clean water and sanitation is a reality that plagues every villa in the country.

In fact, in January, after residents of Villa 21 in Buenos Aires complained about the stench, professionals from the faculty of Community Engineering at the University of Buenos Aires found bacteriological contamination in the water and warned about serious health risks.

That is what motivated Nicolás Wertheimer, a young doctor, to create the Safe Water Project.

“I started working at a hospital in Greater Buenos Aires and when I saw that diarrhea caused by contaminated water was one of the main causes of death among children under five, I wanted to do something,” Wertheimer told IPS.

According to official data, 84 percent of the population of Argentina has access to piped water, but that is no guarantee that the resource is reliable.

“The homes in the shantytowns have the service thanks to informal connections, which generate interruptions in the flow of the network and then often contaminate it,” Wertheimer said.

“In the city of Buenos Aires, the majority of society does not recognise the lack of access to drinking water as a problem. But anyone who has worked in the area of health knows that it is a very serious problem,” said the doctor.

By H.R.H. Princess Sarah Zeid
AMMAN, Oct 30 2015 (IPS)

The 193 member states of the United Nations have adopted an ambitious 15-year sustainable development agenda, the 2030 Global Goals.

H.R.H. Princess Sarah Zeid

To enter through the school gates, I had to negotiate a fetid stream of sewage, broken glass and garbage. The condition of the school building itself was terrible, and even worse were the bathrooms. You could see their appalling state because they had no doors, and thus, zero privacy. All this in a place where the temperature can reach above 120 degrees Fahrenheit (49 degrees Celsius) – it was so hot I felt as if my cheeks were frying.

I look back at this now through the eyes of a mother, and my horror is all the greater. No girl could go to this school, because no girl could go to the bathroom. No child could safely attend this school, because no child could do so without being exposed to disease.

With daughters denied education, confined to home and sons locked in a cycle of exposure to ill health, how can we expect women to participate in commerce, politics, peace and sustainability? How do we think the next generation is going to be educated, skilled and healthy enough to make a positive contribution?

The solutions to women’s and children’s dignity, health and wellbeing lie well beyond the health sector alone, and demand instead an integrated approach, including solutions that deliver water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) in health and in education.

No one’s needs divide neatly into our professional sectors, and sustainable wellbeing and prosperity will not come from fragmented interventions. A holistic approach spanning across all these domains is urgently needed.

The linkages between WASH, health, education and nutrition for that matter are stark. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, more than half the cases of measles in the country are caused by lack of clean water, and poor WASH conditions are a leading cause of malnutrition.

Illness and death in childbirth, and in maternal and child health, are not only the result of the lack of access to quality medical care, nursing or pharmaceuticals. They also happen because nearly 40 per cent of health facilities worldwide have no source of water.

In low-income countries – where preventable mortality is at its highest – an estimated 50 per cent of health care facilities lack access to the electricity they need to boil water and sterilize instruments.

WASH also helps promote gender equality. If water, sanitation and hygiene are designed so that the practical burdens women carry daily are reduced, they will be able to play broader and more creative roles in their community’s development, paving the way towards equitable development in countries and globally. Everyone benefits from these contributions.

There is recognition of the importance of joining up. Last autumn, 16 researchers from the World Health Organization, Unicef, WaterAid and others came together to call for action on joining water, sanitation and hygiene to efforts on maternal and newborn health. The World Health Organization has launched an action plan to address the need for water, sanitation and hygiene in healthcare facilities.

This new sustainable development agenda and, quite frankly, the state of the world today, demands of us another dimension of this integration, too: an integration of our development and humanitarian efforts.

The renewed Every Women Every Child Global Strategy for Women and Children’s Health is working to make this happen. Headed by the Office of the UN Secretary General and supported by a global movement of governments, philanthropic institutions, multi-lateral organizations, civil society organizations, the business community and academics, the renewed Strategy gives new priority to humanitarian and fragile settings and pledges the needed integration to save more lives as life is given.

After all, the right to live life in dignity, the rights to health and to water and sanitation are human rights, universal and indivisible. They are rights to be upheld even in the toughest of situations and at the hardest of times. However, without joined-up pipelines of delivery to enable that flow of human dignity for everyone, everywhere, the promise of the Global Goals will just drain away.

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Excerpt:

By Geeta Rao Gupta
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 9 2015 (IPS)

The new Sustainable Development Goals, agreed upon recently by the member states of the United Nations, are all interconnected, as has been reiterated time and again. However, it is in the new Goal 6 – “Ensure access to water and sanitation for all”—for which this interconnectedness is most apparent.

Geeta Rao Gupta

Water flows throughout the 2030 Development Agenda. And sanitation and hygiene underpin any possible gains from access to water.

If we do not reach Goal 6, the other goals and targets will not be reached. Progress in the areas of education, health, inequality and extreme poverty all depends on how well we do on water and sanitation.

The United Nations some years ago declared that access to water and sanitation is a basic human right. However today, 663 million people are without access to adequate drinking water and 2.4 billion lack adequate toilets.

We at UNICEF are particularly concerned about the children, who are disproportionately affected by the lack of access to these basic needs.

It affects their health. Water and sanitation related diseases are one of the leading causes of death in children under five. Without access to sanitation hundreds of them fall ill and die every single day from preventable causes, particularly diarrhoea and other fecal-oral diseases.

It affects their education. In many communities, girls stay out of school because they need to fetch water; because they do not have a safe space to use when they menstruate; because they must help their mothers care for those who are sick – often from water-borne diseases.

It affects their nutritional status and their development. There is emerging evidence of direct linkages between lack of access to water and sanitation, and chronic malnutrition. Around 159 million children worldwide are stunted (short height for age), a condition which causes irreversible physical and cognitive damage. The repercussions of stunting can be felt beyond the individual child. It can significantly diminish the learning and future earning potential of entire generations, and thus negatively affect the local and national economy.

It affects equality and equity. One important aim in the new SDGs is the goal to reduce inequalities. New evidence from the World Bank shows that investing in water and sanitation for the poorest 20 per cent of a population yields greater economic returns than investing in the other quintiles and thus has the potential to reduce societal inequalities.

Our data from 45 developing countries show that in 7 out of 10 households, the burden of collecting water falls to women and girls, so access would also aid gender equity.

A side event in the margins of the UN General Assembly, hosted by the governments of the Netherlands, South Africa, Hungary and Bangladesh, concluded that targeting the poorest and the most marginalized will require an immense mind-shift for governments. But it must be done.

It cannot be done without strengthening institutions and improving the accountability of governments and service providers. And it will not be done without involving those who have the most at stake – the poor, women, and adolescents – in planning and in monitoring of services. Their influence has already been brought to bear in the drafting of Goal 6, the fastest agreed-upon goal.

It is no coincidence that impressive results are achieved by working closely with those directly affected. Partnership with them is not a ‘nice-to-have’ but a must-have.

In short, access to water and sanitation is not only a matter of dignity and human rights, but fundamental to our ability to attain any of the goals the governments of the world have just adopted.

We must start right away on working on Goal 6, and it can’t be business as usual: we need to start with the most disadvantaged, or we risk losing the gains we have so painstakingly made in the last 15 years, and we endanger the future. There is no time to waste.

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Shanty town near Cape Town, South Africa. Credit: Chell Hill(CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

By Busani Bafana
LUANDA, Sep 3 2015 (IPS)

Slums are a curse and blessing in fast urbanising Africa. They have challenged Africa’s progress towards better living and working spaces but they also provide shelter for the swelling populations seeking a life in cities.

Rural Africans are pouring into towns and cities in search of jobs and other opportunities, but African cities – 25 of which are among the 100 fastest growing cities in the world – are not delivering the much needed support services, including housing, at the same rate as people are demanding them.

The United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) projects that nearly 1.3 billion people – more than the current population of China – will be living in cities in Africa in the next 15 years."We must encourage, identify ‎and celebrate the continent. Our schools need to train architects and city planners in no other way than to appreciate and promote African architectural culture" – Tokunbo Omisore, past president of the African Architects Association

Africa’s urbanisation rate of four percent a year is already over-stretching the capacity of its cities to provide adequate shelter, water, sanitation, energy and even food for its growing population.

Safe and resilient cities and human settlements is one of the aims of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be agreed on in New York next month. As the SDGs replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) launched in September 2000, UN-Habitat has largely succeeded in meeting the target of taking 100 million people out of slums by the time the MDGs expired in Asia, China and part of India … but not in Africa.

However, Tokunbo Omisore, past president of the African Architects Association, believes that Africa can solve its slums situation by planning and developing towns and cities that strike a balance in the provision of housing, water sanitation, energy and transport while luring investments to create jobs.

According to Omisore, the problem lies in the fact that so far settlements have been developed for people but not with people, and he asks if Africa wants the humane aspects of its cultural values and heritage reflected in its cities or has to replicate the cities of developed nations to become classified as developed.

“Slums and sprawls demand understanding the reasons and problems resulting in their existence and identifying the class of people living there,” says Omisore.

“African governments focus on the infrastructural development of developed nations without consideration for the human development of our different communities and ensuring creation of employment opportunities which is key to the sustainability of our cities. People make the cities, not the other way around.”

By redefining slums, policy-makers in Africa can work more on understanding the rural-urban links to arrive at African solutions for African problems, he argues, calling for a “campaign of marketing Africa and appreciating what is African.”

Aisa Kirabo Kacyira, Assistant Secretary General and Deputy Executive Director of UN-Habitat. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

“We must encourage, identify ‎and celebrate the continent. Our schools need to train architects and city planners in no other way than to appreciate and promote African architectural culture.”

At a time Africa is grappling with the issue of land tenure, particularly in agriculture, limited and often expensive land in urban settlements is posing the question of whether Africa should build up or build across, and there are those who argue that densification is the answer to Africa’s housing woes.

At the 2nd Africa Urban Infrastructure Investment Forum hosted by United Cities and Local Government-Africa (UCLG-A) and the government of Angola in Luanda in April,  Aisa Kirabo Kacyira, Assistant Secretary General and Deputy Executive Director of UN-Habitat argued that densification is an avenue for the transformation of Africa and its cities.

“If urbanisation should be possible and if we are going to build landed housing without going up, it simply means it will be expensive, but if we have to densify then we need to go up,” said Kacyira.

“Yes, let us stick to our identity and culture, but let us stick to principles that make economic sense. We are not going to have vibrant cities by running away from the problem and spreading and sprawling.”

Kacyira also argued that by planning, reducing desertification and recycling waste, African cities can help reduce their carbon footprint, a key issue on the post-MDG agenda.

Meanwhile, a Kenya housing project could represent a model for the future of

Housing in Africa. Muungano Wa Wanavijiji, a federation of slum dwellers, has partnered with Shack/Slum Dwellers International to provide decent shelter for people living in slums by creating a low cost three-level house called  ‘The Footprint’, which costs 1,000 dollars.

The project has built 300 houses in two settlements this year. Dwellers pay 20 percent towards the structure and are given support to access a microloan covering 80 percent of the cost.

The UCLG-A network which represents over 1,000 cities in Africa, estimates that Africa needs to mobilise investments of 80 billion dollars a year for upgrading urban infrastructure to meet the needs of urban residents.

Edited by Phil Harris   

A worker prepares seeds in the nursery where Costa Rica’s energy utility, ICE, grows 300,000 trees a year in Cachí, in the central province of Cartago, which it distributes to the public as well as institutions and companies. Credit: Diego Arguedas Ortiz/IPS

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
SAN JOSE, Jul 13 2015 (IPS)

Millions of Latin Americans have better access to clean water and decent housing than 25 years ago. But the region still faces serious environmental challenges, such as deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions – a legacy of the model of development followed in the 20th century.

Fifteen years after signing on to the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the countries of Latin America have made significant headway in eradicating slums, expanding sanitation services, and providing access to clean water.

But progress towards ensuring environmental sustainability is lagging due to a fossil fuel-intensive development model based on the extraction of minerals and monoculture agriculture and livestock raising that expand at the expense of the forests.

“There has been uneven progress, with ups and downs,” said Joseluis Samaniego, director of the Division for Sustainable Development and Human Settlements of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

“In general terms, you have clear, outstanding advances in terms of access to water and sanitation, and we have the impression that those targets will be met,” he told Tierramérica from ECLAC’s regional headquarters in Santiago.

These targets form part of the seventh MDG, which refers to ensuring environmental sustainability, with measurable time-bound targets for the end of this year, based on 1990 indicators.

At year-end, the MDGs will be replaced by 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which the heads of state and government of the 193 United Nations member states are to approve at a summit in September.

Of the targets set by the seventh MDG, this region met the one for halving the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water, five years before this year’s deadline. And between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of the population with sustainable access to an improved water source increased from 85 to 95 percent, although there are still millions of Latin Americans without clean water.

Furthermore, from 1990 to 2014, the proportion of Latin Americans living in slums was nearly cut in half, from 37 to 20 percent, according to U.N. figures.

But that means there is still a long way to go, with more than 100 million people in this region living in slums and shantytowns.

Samaniego said the progress made towards meeting these targets reflects the region’s public spending effort and the clarity of the goals.

“When the MDGs were approved…the clear targets and incentives for monitoring helped countries organise and move forward towards the goals,” the ECLAC official said.

But with respect to incorporating sustainable development and the environment in public policies, there have been fewer advances.

“In terms of deforestation, we’re not doing so well,” said Samaniego. “From 1990 to 2010, forest cover shrank from 52 to 47.4 percent.”

The latest U.N. report assessing global and regional progress towards the MDGs, published Jul. 6, shows that Latin America has not made impressive progress in achieving environmental sustainability.

“Forests are disappearing at a rapid pace, despite the establishment of forest policies and laws supporting sustainable forest management in many countries,” says a regional synthesis document on the report.

Latin America’s economies are still fairly carbon-intensive. One mechanism to measure this is carbon intensity, or how many grams of carbon it takes to produce one dollar of GDP.

While the global average dropped from 600 grams per dollar in 1990 to 470 in 2010, the regional average only fell from 310 to 280 grams per dollar of GDP – an almost statistically insignificant change, according to Samaniego.

That view is shared by United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) regional experts.

“There is an almost linear correlation between a country’s GDP growth and energy consumption, and as long as the energy mix is still based on fossil fuels, it will be directly linked to a rise in emissions,” said Gonzalo Pizarro, regional adviser on poverty, MDGs and human development at the UNDP regional service centre for Latin America and the Caribbean, in Panama City.

In 1990, the region emitted just under one billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent – less than five percent of the world total.

Although the region’s share remained the same in 2011, in just two decades emissions produced by Latin America and the Caribbean rose 80 percent, to 1.8 billion metric tons of CO2, according to the UNDP.

This target, included in the seventh MD, has one particularity: although policies arise from internal decision-making in each country, the results have a global impact.

Although indicators like emissions and loss of forest cover “are linked to people’s well-being, they also have to do with the development model followed by countries,” Pizarro told Tierramérica.

“In economies based on raw materials or commodities, like most of the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, the deforestation rate will remain high, because economic pressure to exploit the forests will continue to be extremely heavy,” he said.

According to the expert, the challenge to be met is modifying the energy mix, while the decisions taken by countries are still focused on the large-scale production of commodities that affect biodiversity.

“As long as decision-makers are incapable of comparing the short-term benefits of this exploitation with the real value of the ecosystemic services provided by forests, this is likely to continue happening on a large scale,” Pizarro said.

The ECLAC and UNDP experts recognised the environmental efforts made by countries in the region like Cuba and Costa Rica, which have reforested; Chile and Uruguay, which have successfully integrated forest industries in their economies; and Brazil, which reduced deforestation in the Amazon.

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Slums in a Kenyan shanty town. Africa has more than 570 million slum-dwellers, according to UN-Habitat, with over half of the urban population (61.7 percent) living in slums. Photo credit: Colin Crowley/CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, May 22 2015 (IPS)

Nompumelelo Tshabalala, 41, emerges from her dwarf ‘shack’ made up of rusty metal sheets and falls short of bumping into this reporter as she bends down to avoid knocking her head against the top part of her makeshift door frame.

“This has been my home for the past 16 years and I have lived here with my husband until his death in 2008 and now with my four children still in this two-roomed shack,” she told IPS.

Tshabalala lives in Diepkloof township in Johannesburg, South Africa, in a densely populated informal settlement – a euphemism for slums, where an estimated 15 million of the country’s approximately 52 million people live, according to UN-Habitat, the U.N. agency for human settlements.

Neighbouring Zimbabwe has an estimated 835,000 people living in informal settlements, according to Homeless International, a British non-governmental organisation focusing on urban poverty issues. “Local authorities in African countries should strike a balance in developing both rural and urban areas, creating employment so that people stop flocking to cities in huge numbers in search of jobs” – Precious Shumba, Harare Residents Trust

“Slum-dwelling here in Africa has become normal, a trend to live with, which is difficult to combat owing to numerous factors ranging from political corruption to economic inequalities necessitated by the growing gap between the rich and the poor,” Gilbert Nyaningwe, an independent development expert from Zimbabwe, told IPS.

Overall, out of an estimated population of 1.1 billion people, Africa has more than 570 million slum-dwellers, reports UN-Habitat, with over half of the urban population (61.7 percent) living in slums. Worldwide, notes the U.N. agency, the number of slum-dwellers now stands at 863 million and is set to shoot up to 889 million by 2020.

Development agencies in Africa say slum-dwelling remains a continental trend despite the U.N. Millennium Development Goals targets compelling all countries globally to achieve a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020.

According to the United Nations, that 100 million target “was met well in advance of the 2020 deadline”, and in African countries such as Egypt, Libya and Morocco the total number of urban slum dwellers has almost been halved, Tunisia has eradicated them completely, and Ghana, Senegal and Uganda have made steady progress, reducing their slum populations by up to 20 percent.

However, sub-Saharan Africa continues to have the highest rate of “slum incidence” of any major world region, with millions of people living in settlements characterised by some combination of overcrowding, tenuous dwelling structures, and poor or no access to adequate water and sanitation facilities.

Hector Mutharika, a retired economist in late Malawian President Kamuzu Banda’s government, blamed poor service delivery for the increase in slums in Africa.

“The increasing numbers of slum dwellers in Africa is due to poor service delivery here by local authorities which more often than not worry most about filling their pockets from local authorities’ coffers instead of channelling proper housing facilities to poor people, which then pushes homeless individuals into building slum settlements anywhere,” Mutharika told IPS.

For Rwandan civil society activist Otapiya Gundurama, the roots of the problem go far back in time. “Shanty homes in Africa are a result of the continent’s urban infrastructure set up during colonial rule at which time housing and economic diversification were limited, with everything related to urban governance centralised, while towns and cities were established to enhance the lifestyles and interests of a minority,” Gundurama told IPS.

Some opposition politicians in Africa, like Gilbert Dzikiti, president of Zimbabwe’s opposition Democratic Assembly for Restoration and Empowerment (DARE), see the trend of growing slums here as a result of government failure. “The perpetual rise of slum settlements in Africa testifies to persistent failure by governments here to invest in both rural and urban development,” Dzikiti told IPS.

African civil society leaders blame rising unemployment on the continent for the continuing rise in the number of slums. “Be it in cities or remote areas, slums in Africa are a result of huge numbers of jobless people who hardly have the means to upgrade their own dwellings,” Precious Shumba, director of the Harare Residents Trust in Zimbabwe, told IPS.

In order to reverse the trend of growing slums across the continent, Shumba said, “local authorities in African countries should strike a balance in developing both rural and urban areas, creating employment so that people stop flocking to cities in huge numbers in search of jobs.”

African slum-dwellers like South Africa’s Tshabalala accuse city authorities of ignoring the mushrooming of informal settlements for selfish reasons.

“Slums here are sources of cheap labour that keeps the wheels of industry turning, which is why local authorities are not concerned about our living standards because they [local authorities] are getting more and more revenue from firms thriving on our sweat,” Tshabalala told IPS.

Meanwhile, rising slum settlements in Africa are also having a knock-on effect for other development goals in the education and health sectors for example.

“The United Nations Millennium Development Goal of universal attainment of primary education for all by the end of this year is certainly set to be missed by a number of countries here in Africa, especially as many of these sprouting slum settlements have no schools to help the children growing in the communities get any education,” a senior official in Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education told IPS on the condition of anonymity for professional reasons.

At the same time, “there are often no toilets, no water and no clinics in most slum-dwelling areas here, exposing people to diseases, consequently derailing the MDG of halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and other diseases in informal settlements,” Owen Dliwayo of the Youth Dialogue Action Network, a lobby group in Zimbabwe, told IPS.

Edited by Phil Harris   

CLEAN-India is an environmental assessment, awareness, action, and advocacy programme that promotes behavioural change among young city dwellers in India. As part of the programme, a group of female students learns about the importance of clean water. Credit: Development Alternatives

By Prerna Sodhi
NEW DELHI, May 16 2015 (IPS)

“Swachh Bharat”, or Clean India, is a slogan that most Indians today associate with the country’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his first nation-wide campaign launched soon after taking office in 2014.

The call has definitely awakened popular consciousness on cleanliness but whether citizens follow it or not is another matter. In fact, it is commonplace to find people calling out “Swachh Bharat” as they toss garbage onto the street.

However, while the campaign may not have brought about the change it was aimed to usher in, a dialogue has started and it is a watershed moment for all those working in this area to capitalise on its momentum.The call for “Swachh Bharat”, or Clean India, has definitely awakened popular consciousness on cleanliness but whether citizens follow it or not is another matter

The idea of cleaning India up is not new, and neither is the term “Swachh Bharat” which has been used by many in the past and has now been “patented” by Modi. For decades, there has been concern with instilling an awareness of the need for cleanliness among citizens, many of whom even defecate in the open.

The current initiative by the government may address the issue of cleanliness at citizens’ level, but activists in the field of sustainable development argue that it should also cover issues related to water, energy and sewage disposal cleanliness.

Access to clean water is one of the main problems that the country faces. According to a report by UNICEF (the U.N. Children’s Agency) and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), every year around 37.7 million Indians are affected by waterborne diseases, 1.5 million children die of diarrhoea alone and 73 million working days are lost due to waterborne diseases.

The problem does not appear to lie in the lack of availability of water treatment methods, but rather in the unwillingness of people to adopt these methods.

“From the field, we observed that the lack of adoption of water purification techniques is not due to low awareness levels and it was not even illiteracy, as is often assumed,” said Kavneet Kaur, field manager for Development Alternatives (DA), a social enterprise set up in 1982 to tackle the serious impact of climate change on society and the environment.

“There was an evident lack of effort and prioritisation of safety among people to undertake one or more options consistently that made drinking water safe,” she added.

Most slum dwellers, for example, “opted for methods that did not cost their pocket a penny. Those who did have access to cheaper methods of treatment, like chlorination and solar water disinfection (SODIS), avoided adopting these methods because they were time consuming.”

For the last 30 years, DA, which works primarily in Bundelkhand in central India, has been addressing the behaviour change necessary for people to adopt water treatment methods.

According to Dr K. Vijaya Lakshmi, DA Vice President, out of the three interrelated components of water, sanitation and hygiene, “hygiene behaviour has been shown to have the biggest impact on community health.”

However, she notes, “despite its merit as the most cost effective public health intervention, ironically there was no global target to improve hygiene during the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) era. It has become evident that the MDG framework has fallen short of addressing quality, sustainability and equity issues.”

To date, DA has reached out to 50,000 households and 26 schools through intensive advocacy campaigns in urban villages, offering training on how to adopt safe water treatment methods such as SODIS, boiling, chlorination and sieving, despite meeting strong resistance from the local population.

For example, storing water in a PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottle exposed to sunlight can kill up to 99 percent of the bacteria in the water, an “innovation” that uses nothing but natural ultraviolet (UV) light to provide safe drinking water for consumption. Water can also be purified by sieving boiled water.

Apart from advocating the adoption of these simple water purification methods, DA has also come up with innovations like the Jal-TARA Water Filter, which removes arsenic, pathogenic bacteria and excess iron from contaminated water, TARA Aqua+ (a sodium hypochlorite solution for purifying water), and TARA Aquacheck Vial, a device that tests for the presence of pathogenic bacteria.

Nevertheless, these innovations are not destined to go very far unless there is a major change in the mindset of the Indian people, and this extends to the “Swachh Bharat” campaign, not just in terms of clean water but also of a cleaner environment.

This idea has also been the driving force behind a youth-led social media campaign known as CLEAN-India ‘The City I Want’, launched by SA and now covering ten Indian cities – Mirzapur, Mohali, Vadodara, Alwar, Ambala, Bharatpur, Indore, Nashik, Mussoorie and Rishikesh.

CLEAN-India (where CLEAN stands for Community Led Environment Action Network) is an environmental assessment, awareness, action and advocacy programme that promotes behavioural change among young city dwellers. It has so far mobilised 28 NGOs, 300 schools, 800 teachers and over one million students.

The campaign is flanked by a number of other citizens’ groups such as resident welfare associations, parent forums, local business associations and clubs, which are actively participating in activities for environmental improvement.

“Going forward, it is crucial that civil society organisation practitioners interface with academic institutions in evidence gathering and inform policy-makers and investors in order to create enabling conditions where scalable innovation can flourish,” says Lakshmi.

Edited by Phil Harris   

Excerpt:

Whether they like it or not, many Africans faced with the possibility of having to access water through prepaid meters have resorted to unprotected and often unclean sources of water because they cannot afford to pay. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, May 8 2015 (IPS)

While many countries appear to have met the U.N. Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water, rights activists say that African countries which have taken to installing prepaid water meters have rendered a blow to many poor people, making it hard for them to access water.

“The goal to ensure that everyone has access to clean water here in Africa faces a drawback as a number of African countries have resorted to using prepaid water meters, which certainly bar the poor from accessing the precious liquid,” Claris Madhuku, director of the Platform for Youth Development, a Zimbabwean democracy lobby group, told IPS.

Prepaid water meters work in such a way that if a person cannot pay in advance, he or she will be unable to access water.Despite U.N. recognition that water is a human right, international financial institutions such as the World Bank argue that water should be allocated through market mechanisms to allow for full cost recovery from users

As a result, African rights activists like award-winning Terry Mutsvanga from Zimbabwe and other civil society organisations are against the idea of prepaid water meters.

“If one has to pay upfront before accessing water, then it would mean those in most need would be denied access,” Mutsvanga told IPS, adding that water is a global human right.

Mutsvanga was echoing the United Nations General Assembly which, in July 2010, emerged with a binding resolution on the human right to water and sanitation – but for Africa, the human right to water may be far from reality.

Laden with a population of approximately 1.1 billion, Africa’s 300 million people have no access to safe drinking water, according to the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP).

Many rights activists on the continent attribute Africa’s mounting water challenges partly to the advent of prepaid water meters.

“We already have hundreds of millions of people without access to clean water, and imagine the severity of the water challenge if water prepaid meters would reach everyone on the continent,” Mutsvanga said.

Over the years, prepaid water meters have been widely used in African countries like Namibia, Nigeria, Swaziland and Tanzania, as well as South Africa, where the meters which were rolled out in 1999 are currently in low-income areas.

Zimbabwe is currently conducting a pilot project aimed at installing the prepaid water meters, in towns and cities to begin with. And the country’s impoverished urban dwellers like 51-year old Tinago Chikasha are in panic mode, fearing the worst may be coming their way.

“Local authorities are pressing ahead with the idea of prepaid water meters, but jobless people like me have no money to make prepayments for water while we already have unpaid water bills running into thousands of dollars, which local authorities say they will deduct through all future water prepayments, meaning we run into the danger of having dry water taps for as long as we owe local authorities,” Chikasha told IPS.

In non-African countries like the United Kingdom, prepaid water meters are no longer being used after they were declared illegal in 1998 for public health reasons.

They were also abandoned in South Africa at one stage following a massive cholera outbreak, but were reintroduced and have replaced previously free communal standpipes in rural townships.

Despite U.N. recognition that water is a human right, international financial institutions such as the World Bank argue that water should be allocated through market mechanisms to allow for full cost recovery from users, and civil society activists like Melusi Khumalo in South Africa blame capitalist tendencies for necessitating the advent of prepaid water meters.

“Prepaid water meters are a result of such negative policies by institutions like the World Bank and they [prepaid water meters] deny water access to those in most need,” Khumalo, who is affiliated to Parktown North Residents’ Association in Johannesburg, told IPS.

In Zimbabwe, Mfundo Mlilo, chief executive officer of Combined Harare Residents’ Association (CHRA), told IPS: “We are vehemently against the prepaid meter project because it will not solve the problems of water delivery, and these prepaid water meters will not lead to residents receiving adequate safe and clean water, while the same prepaid water meters will also not lead to increase in revenue flows as the City [of Harare] claims.”

Last month, Harare’s Town Clerk Tendai Mahachi was reported by Zimbabwe’s Weekend Post as saying: “With these meters we expect roughly to save about 20-30 percent of the current costs we are incurring.”

According to Mahachi, at least 300 000 households in the Zimbabwean capital are scheduled to have prepaid water meters installed, while all new housing projects will be obliged to install meters.

Meanwhile, with prepaid water meters set to rake in big money for some of Africa’s local authorities, there are those like Nathan Jamela, an urban dweller in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second largest city, who fear the health consequences.

“We experienced the worst cholera outbreak in 2008, and we fear that if prepaid water meters are installed in every household here we will slide back to the crisis, with many people unable to afford to pay for water,” Jamela told IPS.

Edited by Phil Harris   

Africa must now go beyond household water access indices to embrace water as a key development issue, say experts at the Jan. 15-17 U.N. International Water Conference in Zaragoza. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

By Miriam Gathigah
ZARAGOZA, Jan 15 2015 (IPS)

Although African countries have been lauded for their efforts towards ensuring that people have access to safe drinking water in keeping with Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), they have nonetheless come under scrutiny for failure to prioritise water in their development agendas.

Thomas Chiramba, Head of Freshwater Ecosystems Unit at the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) in Kenya, told IPS that in spite of progress on the third component of MDG7 – halve the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015 – water scarcity still poses a significant threat to sustainable development in Africa.

Attending the United Nations’ International Water Conference being held in this Spanish city from Jan. 15-17,  he said that “there is too much focus on household water access indices and not enough on linkages between water and sustainable development.”While there are now more people in Africa with improved sources of water and sanitation, experts say that this is not enough. The continent is still facing water scarcity, with negative implications for growth and health.

While there are now more people in Africa with improved sources of water and sanitation, experts say that this is not enough. The continent is still facing water scarcity, with negative implications for growth and health.

In view of the rapid and unpredictable changes in environmental systems, Chiramba said that unless Africa broadens its national and international water goals the region will find it difficult to remain economically resilient.

“Water is key to the agricultural and energy sectors, both critical to accelerating growth and development in Africa,” he added.

The theme of the Zaragoza conference is ‘Water and Sustainable Development: From Vision to Action’ and is at the heart of adaptation to climate, also serving as a key link among climate systems, human society and environment.

One of the main aims of the conference is to develop implementing tools, with regard to financing, technology, capacity development and governance frameworks, for initiating the post-2015 agenda on water and sanitation.

More than 300 participants representing U.N. agencies and programmes, experts, the business community, and governmental and non-governmental organisations have converged with the main aim of addressing water as a sustainable development goal.

“Although water goals and targets were achieved under the MDGs, the main focus was on Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH), all geared towards poverty reduction,” said Chiramba. “But there was no explicit focus on addressing the sustainability aspect.”

As a result, say experts, water management issues were never comprehensively addressed at the national or international level, nor was the key role that water can play in growing the various sectors of the economy.

This year is also the last year of the International Decade for Action ‘Water for Life’ which began in 2005, and will set the tone for World Water Day to be marked on March 22, which will also focus on ‘water and sustainable development’.

The primary goal of the ‘Water for Life’ Decade has been to promote efforts to fulfil international commitments made on water and water-related issues by 2015. The Water Decade has served to forge cooperation at all levels so that the water-related goals of the Millennium Declaration are achieved.

The end of the Decade also marks the beginning of new water campaigns, “this time, with great focus on the impact of water on development,” said Chiramba.

The Zaragoza water conference has brought to the fore the fact that the Decade has achieved the difficult task of isolating water issues as key to the development agenda and has provided a platform for governments and stakeholders to address the threats that water scarcity poses to development, experts say.

“It has also been a platform for stakeholders and government to discuss the opportunities that exist in exploiting water as a resource,” said Alice Shena, a civil society representative at the event.

As a result of the Water Decade, Shena noted, a broader international water agenda has been established that goes beyond universal access to safe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene.

“The agenda now includes the sustainable use and development of water resources, increasing and sharing the available benefits which have significant implications for every sector of the economy,” she said.

According to environment expert Nataliya Nikiforova, as a new era of development goals begins under the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), it is clear that water will play a critical role in development.

She said  that if managed efficiently and equitably, water can play a key enabling role in strengthening the resilience of social, economic and environmental systems in the light of rapid and unpredictable changes.

Edited by Phil Harris

The Irulas harvest produce from the mangrove forest for a livelihood. Here, an Irula man pulls a crab trap that he had laid out in the morning before heading off to fish in the sea. Malini Shankar/IPS

By Malini Shankar
PICHAVARAM, India, Dec 10 2014 (IPS)

When the Asian tsunami washed over several Indian Ocean Rim countries on Boxing Day 2004, it left a trail of destruction in its wake, including a death toll that touched 230,000.

Millions lost their jobs, food security and traditional livelihoods and many have spent the last decade trying to pick up the pieces of their lives. But for a small tribe in southern India, the tsunami didn’t bring devastation; instead, it brought hope.

Numbering some 25,000 people, the Irulas have long inhabited the Nilgiri Mountains in the states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, and have traditionally earned a living by ridding the farmland of rats and snakes, often supplementing their meagre income by working as daily wage agricultural labourers in the fields.

Now, on the eve of the 10-year anniversary of the tsunami, the Irulas in Tamil Nadu are a living example of how sustainable disaster management can alleviate poverty, while simultaneously preserving an ancient way of life.

Prior to 2004, the Irula people laboured under extremely exploitative conditions, earning no more than 3,000 rupees (about 50 dollars) each month. Nutrition levels were poor, and the community suffered from inadequate housing and sanitation facilities.

They were finally included on the government’s List of Scheduled Tribes, largely thanks to the efforts of a government official named G.S. Bedi from the tsunami-ravaged coastal district of Cuddalore in Tamil Nadu.

Inclusion on the list enabled the community to become legal beneficiaries of state-sponsored developmental schemes like the Forest Rights Act and other sustainable fisheries initiatives, thereby improving their access to better housing, and bringing greater food and livelihood security.

More importantly, community members say, the post-tsunami period has marked a kind of revival among Irulas, who are availing themselves of sustainable livelihood schemes to conserve their environment while also increasing their wages.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Out of desperation, flood victims in Asunción have built makeshift shelters in public spaces, like this improvised camp opposite the Congress building. Credit: Natalia Ruiz Díaz/IPS

By Natalia Ruiz Diaz
ASUNCIÓN, Jul 3 2014 (IPS)

The worst floods in the history of Paraguay have forced 300,000 people to flee their homes. Asunción, the most affected area, and other urban and rural areas were flooded by the rain-swollen Paraguay and Paraná rivers, foreshadowing what might happen when the El Niño phenomenon kicks in.

“I lost everything, I had my workshop but nothing is left, I only salvaged my tools,” one of the flood victims, Antonio Esteban, told IPS as he tried to fix a television set next to the four walls of wood and metal sheets he put up as a shelter for his family in front of the Congress building, after fleeing the Chacarita neighbourhood.“I just want to weep, but I hold it back. I have to be strong and keep working, because this flood has left my husband without work." -- Myriam Agüero

“The main problem is getting water for drinking, cooking and bathing,” he said.

The bad news is that the Paraguay river could soon rise further, after reaching the record level of 7.19 metres in the port of Asunción, pushing the waters into the heart of the city after completely flooding the low-lying neighbourhoods along the banks, where boats have become the only means of transport.

Heavy rains have flooded not only Paraguay, but also regions of the Parana basin in Argentina and Brazil. At least 12,000 people have been evacuated in Argentina and 50,000 in Brazil, and the authorities of both countries have warned that the situation will get worse, because more rain is forecast for the coming days.

In Paraguay, more than 15,000 families have been displaced by the floods, according to official figures which are lower than those of local and international organisations. In the capital city with its population of 514,000, over 60,000 people have had to leave their homes to live in camps on military bases or public spaces.

Alejandro Max Pastene, of the climatology department at the National Directorate of Meteorology and Hydrology, told IPS that June, July and August are usually dry months in Paraguay. But this year, heavy rains began in June.

So when the normal rainy season arrives, from October to March, “there will not have been time for the river level to fall.”

Moreover, this year “the rains from October onwards will be particularly intense because of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation meteorological phenomenon,” he said. This is caused by warmer than usual surface temperatures in the east and central tropical Pacific ocean.

Pastene said that the critical level for flooding of the Paraguay river is 5.5 metres, nearly two metres below its current level of 7.19 metres. “In a single day, Jun. 27, as much rain fell as in a normal month,” he said.

Residents in lowlying shanty towns like Bañado Sur, Tacumbú and Chacarita had to evacuate with virtually no help at all.

In improvised shelters on public land, the homeless are living in crowded structures of wood, plastic and metal sheeting. Drinking water and sanitation are their major needs.

Aldo Zaldívar, director of operations at the National Emergency Secretariat (SEN), told IPS the situation had exceeded all forecasts and assistance had not arrived as quickly as was required.

He said the SEN has provided provisions, materials and logistics to 75,000 people in Asunción and over 150,000 people in affected areas in the rest of the country.

The worst affected zones are in the department of Presidente Hayes, in the Chaco region (west), in the department of Ñeembucú (southwest), and in the department of Alto Paraná (north).

“Our orders are to do whatever is necessary to meet the needs of the population. And we are doing this, but sometimes we cannot arrive as soon as people want,” Zaldívar said about the situation that began in June.

But criticism is mounting over the slow and insufficient reaction of the authorities to the worst river flooding in 30 years, especially from social organisations working in the affected areas.

The government of rightwing President Horacio Cartes is coming in for particular criticism for failing to support the lowlying neighbourhoods, local residents and activists reported. Later on, images were being circulated showing representatives of the ruling party proselytising with state aid to the flood victims.

Part of the deficiencies were alleviated by solidarity campaigns organised by NGOs, clubs, youth groups and neighbourhood organisations that collect money, clothes, food and materials to resettle families who have to evacuate their homes.

At present the authorities have opened 86 shelters to house families who had to abandon their homes in Asunción. Two thousand families have been relocated on three military bases alone.

Conditions in the shelters are far from ideal. The main problem is sanitation, as there are no more chemical toilets. The SEN has commissioned the building of toilets and showers in containers, which will be used to alleviate the lack of these facilities in the camps.

The “palangana” (washbowl)

Miguel Barrios is a blacksmith, like Esteban, and he was unable to salvage much when the waters reached his home. He finds it incredible that Chacarita is still being flooded after the works built along Costanera avenue, that were supposed to act as a retaining wall by the river.

“The neighbourhood was left in the ‘palangana’ (washbowl), between the Costanera avenue and the Asunción city wall,” he said.

Juan Ramón Martínez, another Chacarita resident, experienced the great flood of 1983, the biggest on record so far in Asunción, and in his view the present flood is much worse.

At the camp in front of the Congress building, people are working with spades, sawing wood and hammering nails in roofs, women and children included. All around, clothes are spread to dry in the sun.

In another part of the city, not far from the historic centre and the downtown area where public institutions are located, Myriam Agüero is evacuating from the Yta Pyta Punta neighbourhood with her husband and four children.

“The floodwaters have arrived, we have no alternative. We can’t even stay on the second storey of our house,” the 33-year-old woman, a leader in the Domestic Workers’ Union in Paraguay, told IPS.

Agüero was born in the lowlying belt of shanty towns in the floodpains along the banks of the Paraguay river, where many women go out to work as domestic employees.

“I just want to weep, but I hold it back. I have to be strong and keep working, because this flood has left my husband without work,” she said with tears in her eyes.

Teodosia Duarte, another flood victim, said with resignation, “They say we will be here for many months.”

According to forecasts, the river level will not fall markedly until 2015.

Duarte is distressed by the thought of what she will find when she eventually goes back to her home and neighbourhood. She pressed her hands against her chest and said in Guaraní, the mother tongue of Paraguayans: “Ñandejara tuicha ohecha kuaá va´era ñandeve” (God is great, he will help us).

Nasreen Jehan, a high school student in eastern India, studies a leaflet on menstrual hygiene. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
BETTIAH, India, May 28 2014 (IPS)

Fifteen-year-old Nasreen Jehan, a student in the eastern Indian state of Bihar, proudly flaunts a yellow and red beaded bracelet encircling her wrist. This humble accessory, she tells IPS, is her most treasured possession.

“It helps me keep track of my menstrual calendar,” says the 9^th-grader, who attends a government-run, all-girls school in a town called Bettiah. “Also, it helps me talk about menstruation with my friends.”

Of the 24 small beads that comprise the delicate adornment, six are read, symbolising the days of her monthly period. Jehan made the bracelet herself at a menstrual hygiene workshop in Bettiah last year, organised by Nirmal Bharat Yatra (NBY) – a nationwide sanitation campaign spearheaded by the Geneva-based Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC).

Educators at the workshop talked Jehan and her peers through the biological process of menstruation, offering tips on how to properly wash and dry menstrual cloths if sanitary napkins are unavailable.

“My mother and my aunt never stepped out of the house when they had their periods. That was our family tradition." -- Soumya Selvi, a 10th-grader in southern India
Finally, they gave Jehan the most important message of all: that menstruation is just as natural as hunger or sweating, and that there is nothing to be ashamed or afraid of.

It is rudimentary advice, but crucial in a country like India, where menstruation has long been perceived as a social taboo. In many parts of the country, a woman on her period becomes essentially “untouchable” – banned from cooking, handling water or entering places of worship.

According to a study undertaken by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) back in 2012, some 225 million adolescent girls attend one of the 1.37 million schools spread across the country. Of them, roughly 66 percent have no knowledge of menstruation before they reach puberty.

A full 88 percent of these girls do not have access to what the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) calls WASH facilities: water, sanitation and hygiene, including soap or sanitary supplies.

According to data compiled by AC Nielsen in 2011, the average Indian adolescent girl (between the ages of 12 and 18) misses 50 days of school a year as a result of inadequate facilities, or a lack of awareness of menstruation. Some 23 percent of all schoolgirls – over 50 million in total – drop out of school altogether once they hit puberty.

Of India’s roughly 335 million women, a mere 12 percent have access to sanitary napkins.

Because the subject is seldom discussed, even among families, peers or community members, many women resort to extremely unsanitary options during their period, including the use of unsanitised cloth, ashes or sand. Reproductive tract infections (RTIs) are 70 percent more common among women who engage in these practices.

This year, for the first time, the world will mark May 28 as Menstrual Hygiene Day, designed to address the very challenges countries like India are facing.

Against this backdrop, the NYB campaign is not only timely, it is essential if India hopes to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), development targets set by the world body in 2000 and set to expire in 2015.

Also known as the Great WASH Yatra, NYB aims to “improve policy and practice in an extremely challenging and taboo area of sanitation and hygiene: Menstrual Hygiene Management (MHM).”

Launched in 2012, the 150,000-dollar campaign – generously supported by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – will continue until 2016.

Already it has reached over 12,000 women and girls around the country, an overwhelming majority of who are adolescent students who say that being empowered to break the silence around menstruation is making a huge difference in their lives.

This process, though, has not been easy. Urmila Chanam, a Bangalore-based MHM educator who travelled to six states during the early stages of the campaign, said the stigma against menstruation runs deep, having been embedded for years in the minds of men and women alike.

“When a girl in India gets her first period, everyone tells her that she is impure because the blood flowing out of her is dirty,” Chanam told IPS.

“So, she grows up convinced that this is a shameful thing that she must not discuss. The first challenge of an educator is to have the girl overcome this sense of shame and fear. Everything else comes after that,” added Chanam, who also runs a web-based campaign called ‘Breaking the Silence’ that encourages both women and men to openly discuss the issue.

The determined efforts of a handful of NGOs and activists like Chanam have set the wheels of a full-blown movement in motion, with thousands of young women across the country coming forward to share their experiences.

A fine example of this is Soumya Selvi, a 10^th-grade student in a girls’ school in Srirangam, a town located about 320 km south of Chennai city in southern India.

Three years ago, Selvi and her fellow classmates were privy to a UNESCO-led reproductive health campaign, and became virtual ambassadors for the issue. Selvi alone has shared her knowledge with nearly 50 other girls in her school and her neighborhood. She has also not missed a single day of school during her period.

“My mother and my aunt never stepped out of the house when they had their periods,” she told IPS. “That was our family tradition. But, I told them, ‘this will happen to me until I am 50 years old, perhaps older. Should I sit at home all my life?’

“After that, they never asked me to miss school,” she recounted with a wide smile.

Still, experts agree that independent efforts can only achieve so much. Without government support, it could take decades to reach every woman and girl who remains fearful and silent. What is needed, they say, are inclusive and targeted training programmes that can help scale up impacts of individual campaigns.

Mukti Bosco, an eminent activist and founder of Healing Fields, a Hyderabad-based NGO that works with schools on menstrual hygiene management, told IPS it is time for campaigns to target female teachers and mothers, who can “instill positive behaviour in the girls.”

Others emphasise the role of communication as in invaluable tool in spreading the message. Sinu Joseph, a Bangalore-based MHM educator, has so far trained 8,000 girls across the southwestern state of Karnataka using an animation video.

“Young girls often ask, ‘Why can’t I visit a temple when I have my period?’” Joseph told IPS. “To answer such questions, one has to first know the cultural history. [Educators] must earn the trust of women and girls, so that they are comfortable enough to speak. Then they… not only learn, but also feel empowered.”

(END)

Speaking of the widespread sanitation crisis, U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson was quick to produce staggering numbers: of the world’s seven billion people, about six billion have mobile phones but only about 4.5 billion have access to toilets.

Indian children use a microfinanced facility in their backyard in a Bhubaneswar slum. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

“And that leaves about 2.5 billion people, mostly in rural areas, without proper sanitation,” he points out.

Ironically, the world is saturated with an abundance of cell phones but is desperately searching for non-existing toilets.

A cartoon in a World Bank 2013 calendar puts the numbers in an even more realistic but light-hearted perspective.

The sketch shows a villager in some remote corner of the world, armed with a roll of toilet paper in one hand and a smart phone on the other, trying to track down the nearest toilet on the global positioning system (GPS).

The screen on the mobile phone reads: “Nearest toilet 2 kilometres away.”

Still, he is considered fortunate, because an estimated 1.1 billion people, (out of the 2.5 billion without adequate sanitation), are forced to defecate in the open because there are no toilets anywhere, says Eliasson.

And so, the World Bank is trying to help resolve the world’s sanitation problems with digital technology and mobile phone applications (Apps).

Last week it announced three prize-winners of the Sanitation Hackathon and App Challenge, described as a yearlong project to recognise innovative and locally relevant apps that address sanitation challenges.

Manobi, a mobile and internet services firm based in Dakar, Senegal, has developed an SMS (short message service) reporting tool that enables students, parents, and teachers to monitor and report on school sanitation facilities.

Sun-Clean, developed by a team of students at the University of Indonesia, is an app designed to teach children good sanitation and hygiene practices. The app includes two games: Disposal Trash and Hand Wash for Kids.

And Taarifa, created by a team of developers based in England, Germany, the United States and Tanzania, is an open source web application that enables public officials to tag and respond to citizen complaints about the delivery of sanitation services.

Asked about the digital approach to sanitation, Joseph Pearce, technical advisor at the London-based WaterAid, told IPS: “These apps are great examples of the wealth of ICT (information and communication technologies) innovations that are being produced to improve monitoring and education around water, sanitation, and hygiene.”

He said such simple ideas have the potential to transform lives. However, there are key technical and governance challenges in translating these projects into lasting solutions.

“Apps will play an increasingly important role in informing decision-making, but there is no technical solution to using this data,” he added.

Data collection still costs money, and political will is required to finance and act upon the findings. Turning data into decisions and concrete actions to improve access to water and sanitation, he cautioned, is perhaps the hardest part.

Clarissa Brocklehurst, former chief of water, sanitation and hygiene at the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF, told IPS that sanitation is such a huge and, so far, intractable problem that “we need to bring every bit of innovation to it that we can”.

This means solutions in terms of technology, institutions, behaviour change, financing and monitoring.

“The kinds of innovation the information technology (IT) community can bring are very welcome as a contribution. We clearly need more than apps and websites but they represent important new ways to tackle parts of the sanitation problem,” said Brocklehurst.

Andy Narracott, deputy chief executive officer of Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP), and who leads the organisation’s Enterprises Business Unit, told IPS that technology alone cannot solve the global sanitation crisis.

“But by combining it with business experts, strategists, sociologists and engineers, then real innovation can happen.”

This is what the Sanitation Hackathon sought to achieve, and by looking at the winning solutions, this has been a hugely successful initiative, he added.

Technology-based innovations can play a key role in many sanitation-related challenges, including mapping demand for sanitation services, identifying coverage gaps, capturing customer feedback and communicating sanitation and hygiene messages to change people’s behaviour, Narracott said.

“But the critical challenge is how this information is used and acted upon,” he said.

He said the sector also needs sufficient capacity and finance to convert this information into increased access for people, especially those living in low-income areas in cities and towns across the developing world.

“The challenge has only just begun,” he cautioned.

Tools are only effective if people know how to use them were interested to see how the deployment of these tools works out, he added.

“We’d like to see this initiative now extended into a global collaborative platform, where many people can use them and iterate them collaboratively,” he noted.

Asked about the validity of the criticism that the international community is paying more attention to water than sanitation, Brocklehurst told IPS, “I think that in the past the international community has paid more attention to water, and that this is why we see such a huge difference in progress.

“We have met the water MDG (Millennium Development Goals) target, and 89 percent of the world’s population uses at least an improved source of water, even though some of that water may be of dubious quality, while only 63 percent of the world’s population has improved sanitation and over a billion still resort to open defecation.”

But that is starting to change, she said, as the impact of poor sanitation becomes clearer.

The health impacts are more generally researched and recognised, but more importantly, the economic impacts are now widely discussed.

Asked about the severity of the sanitation crisis in the run-up to the MDG deadline of 2015, Brocklehurst said, “The sanitation crisis is serious as we are a long way off from reaching the MDG target, and current estimates are that we will miss it by many millions of people.”

She said in many countries a huge acceleration in progress would be needed to reach the MDG, “and at current rates we would not reach it at a global level until 2026.”

More serious is the large proportion of people who lack improved sanitation who are actually using no sanitation at all, but resorting to the dangerous practice of open defecation – a practice that is dangerous not only for themselves, but for anyone living in their communities.

According to a press release, over 100 local partners supported the Sanitation Hackathon events.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provided financial support, alongside the World Bank, and Toilet Hackers provided critical in-kind support.

By Malini Shankar
BANGALORE, India, Dec 26 2012 (IPS)

Of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) -development targets agreed upon by the international community, whose 2015 deadline is approaching fast – MDG 7 has proven a particular challenge, especially for sprawling, populous countries like India.

With the ambitious aim of improving both natural ecosystems and human environments, MDG 7 comprises numerous targets, from halving the percentage of the world’s population without access to safe drinking water and sanitation, to protecting global fish stocks by preventing illegal fishing and overfishing.

Having pledged millions of euros to helping developing countries achieve the MDGs, the European Union has kept a sharp eye on India, whose regulations and efforts regarding MDG 7 have been inadequate, experts say.

China and India combined are still home to 216 million people without access to clean water and sanitation.
Meanwhile unsustainable fishing practices carry on unchecked. The Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute’s latest census counted 243,939 trawlers, despite an official EU ban on these fishing vessels in shallow waters off the coast.

The EU has also placed a full ban on fishing in protected areas like the Gulf of Mannar Marine National Park, but commercial fishers take advantage of loopholes in the law to invade these reserves.

For far too many households in Burkina Faso, going to the toilet means heading for the bush. The Burkinabè government has launched a new campaign to change this, calling on prominent personalities as both sponsors and champions.

“It’s an initiative based on solidarity between individuals and communities in order to speed up construction of latrines and put an end to defecation in the open air – which is a widespread practice more or less everywhere in the country – and to reduce diseases linked to poor hygiene,” explained Halidou Koanda, who works for the non-governmental organisation WaterAid.

In 2011, WaterAid and the Burkinabè Ministry for Water and Agriculture carried out a survey of the home villages of 70 notable people from all walks of life, including members of parliament, government ministers, and former presidents, prominent business people and sports personalities.

“When we toured their home villages, we found the same thing everywhere: the rate of open air defecation was close to 95 percent,” Koanda told IPS.

“In rural areas, it’s not rare to see VIPs who are hosting guests in their home villages for some occasion find themselves struggling to provide facilities for their guests to relieve themselves,” he said.

According to a 2010 survey carried out by the National Institute for Statistics and Demographics (INSD), the rate of access to a toilet inside the household is just 3.1 percent nationally. Nearly ten percent of urban households have a latrine, whereas in rural areas that falls to less than one percent.

“Even though the government and its partners are spending money on sanitation, the number of projects being completed each year will not allow us to attain the Millennium Development Goal in 2015,” said Marie Denis Sondo, director general of waste water and excreta at the ministry for water and agriculture.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are a series of development and anti-poverty targets agreed by U.N. member states in 2000. One of the targets is to halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and sanitation.

Faced with the slow progress on the question of hygiene and sanitation, the Burkinabè government and its partners launched a national campaign of advocacy and mobilisation for adequate access to sanitation in 2010.

At the end of the campaign, the government and its partners had constructed 617,000 household latrines and 13,200 public toilets built at a total cost of around 120.7 million dollars.

But the resources marshalled by the government and donors will not allow enough latrines to be built to reach the MDG in 2015, said WaterAid’s Koanda.

“So society’s leaders must lend their financial support to build latrines as well as give some of their time to raise awareness and mobilise people so that questions of hygiene and sanitation are prioritised,” Sondo told IPS.

The response to this call has come from the very top. The Burkinabè prime minister, Luc Adolphe Tiao, hails from the village of Pouni, a hundred kilometres south of the capital. Dominique Ido, Pouni’s mayor, told IPS the sanitation situation there is much the same as in other rural areas of the country.

“There are very few households with their own toilets in the village. Maybe two percent,” he said. “There are communal latrines in the schools and other public places, but people don’t use them at night. So we are hoping to bring everyone we can together around this initiative so we can increase the number of toilets between now and 2015.”

In August, the prime minister made his contribution. “The government decided last February that each person will make a gift of toilets in his village or neighbourhood. So I’ve constructed thirty in my village, hoping that this gesture will lead others to follow,” said Tiao.

“Sanitation has become a real problem in our country, and it’s an important indicator of development,” he said.

According to WaterAid, if significant numbers of VIPs follow the prime minister’s lead, it may still be possible to reach the MDG on sanitation.

To mobilise additional funding, the government and its partners also organised a “sanitation marathon” on public radio and television, which raised around 170,000 dollars.

“It’s the first time, but a successful effort. Now the government wants to see the initiative organised in each region so the most celebrated sons in each area can rally round the political and administrative authorities to make sure the question of toilets is no longer just a matter for the government,” said Koanda.

Arthur Kafando, the minister for commerce, said that his village, Rayongo, on the outskirts of Ouagadougou, is a newly subdivided area and lacks sanitation facilities. “I built a dozen toilets. We want to help people to understand the importance of these matters for their well-being. So we are going to appeal to many others to help us.”