Consultant Dan
22 November 2010
Adam Laidlaw opinion piece on cholera, sanitation and aid
CHOLERA TARGETS FALLING BEHIND
Canberra Times
22 Nov 2010
Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd announced last week that the Government was providing emergency support to the Government of Papua New Guinea, in response to an outbreak of cholera on Daru Island, in Western province. Elsewhere, thousands have contracted cholera in Haiti, following January’s devastating earthquake and just three months after floods hit Pakistan, people from affected areas are facing an outbreak. Cholera crises such as these come and go, but the disease will remain a constant killer unless aid programs are increased and targeted to disease prevention.
WaterAid welcomes the positive response from Australia to assist PNG. However, the greater tragedy is that cholera is entirely and easily preventable. Cholera can be stopped in its tracks once safe sanitation, safe water and better hygiene are provided to vulnerable communities.
It is a disease of poverty and we see it too often in many of the countries where WaterAid works. For millions of people across the world it is an everyday killer, spreading rapidly anywhere that people lack adequate toilets, sewage treatment and drinking water. The World Health Organisation estimates there are 3-5million cases of cholera every year, and the disease is becoming more prevalent.
While cholera regularly attracts the media’s attention, another more silent killer reaps more widespread devastation on a daily basis. Diarrhoea is now the leading cause of child death in Africa and the second leading cause in the entire world. Most of these preventable deaths are caused by poor sanitation and dirty water.
Almost one billion people lack access to safe, clean water and 2.6 billion people are still in desperate need of somewhere safe and hygienic to go to the toilet. Last Friday was World Toilet Day, which prompted us to ask what our aid budget is doing to improve sanitation and where it fits in among competing priorities for scarce funds. The United Nations is tackling this problem as it tries to keep the Millennium Development Goals on track.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki- moon has said that sanitation should be a plank of development aid, even as he promotes new goals for Maternal and Child Health and Climate Adaptation. United States Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and our own Government are enthusiastic supporters of increased aid funding to help developing countries adapt to climate change and improve the health of mothers and children. The way to understanding the relationship between these supposedly competing goals is to see that building toilets and providing clean water are two of the best ways to deliver health and climate resilience to communities.
Delivering sanitation and safe drinking water have numerous, knock-on benefits for all other aspects of development. A lack of sanitation has the greatest impact on the poorest and most vulnerable people in society, particularly women and children. Girls miss school days once they reach puberty due to the shame and embarrassment of managing menstruation without the privacy of a toilet.
This undermines their chance for education and ultimately keeps them out of positions of power in society where they may be able to initiate positive change. In short, while more girls are starting primary school, fewer are completing secondary education. It is a shocking failure that the world is so off track to meet the sanitation Millennium Development Goal target, to halve the proportion of people living without this basic human right by 2015.
At current rates of progress, the 2015 target will not be met globally until 2049; in sub-Saharan Africa, not until the 23rd century. The distribution of aid by country also reveals worrying trends, such as middle-income countries receiving the lion’s share of aid to the sector. In 2007, Australia heard the evidence about aid effectiveness and announced a Water and Sanitation Initiative.
This has supported tens of thousands of people across the globe to enjoy their basic human rights of safe water and improved sanitation. Infants in these communities have a greater chance of surviving. Children are more likely to go to school.
The Water and Sanitation Initiative ends in 2011 and now is the time for the Government to plan for a larger, multi-year program to continue this good work.
Adam Laidlaw is chief executive of the NGO WaterAid in Australia. This piece was published today in the print edition of the Canberra Times (p.9) and may be available in the online edition some time.
RSS