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Washington Meet on Sanitation Ends

Action to ensure access to safe water stressed

25 April 2010, 18:00 PM

METROPOLITAN

Staff Correspondent

The first annual high-level meeting for Sanitation and Water for All ended in Washington DC yesterday with an aim to find out ways to stimulate urgent action towards ensuring access to sanitation and safe drinking water in different countries. Sanitation and Water for All convened the meeting on Friday to boost the programmes to meet the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the proportion of people living without access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation, says a Unicef release. “Safe drinking water, basic sanitation and hygiene are essential for health and welfare of individuals as well as nations. Countries cannot make progress if millions of working days and school days are lost due to diseases caused by contaminated water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene, and if children are still dying from preventable causes such as diarrhoea,” said Clarissa Brocklehurst, Unicef chief of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene. Experts said at least 2.5 billion cases of diarrhoea occur in children under five years of age every year globally, and an estimated 1.5 million children die from it annually. Huge savings in health care costs and gains in productive days can be realised by improving access to safe water, sanitation and hygiene -- amounting to some 2 percent to over 7 percent of gross domestic product, depending on the region. Hosted by Unicef, the high-level meeting was participated by 35 ministers from developing countries, donors and development agencies. A high-level delegation, including Finance Minister AMA Muhith and Local Government, Rural Development and Cooperatives Minister Syed Ashraful Islam represented Bangladesh in the meeting. Although Bangladesh is on track to achieve the MDG target for access to safe drinking water, arsenic contamination, increased salinity in groundwater in coastal belt, declining groundwater levels and susceptibility to the impact of natural disasters pose significant risks to the availability of safe drinking water. Today, 20 million people are still drinking arsenic contaminated water here. The practice of open defecation has been significantly reduced to seven percent from 33 percent in 1990. However, only 53 percent of population has access to improved sanitation facilities. Local Government Division Secretary Monzur Hossain said, “Bangladesh has to deal with the particular challenges undermining safe water and sanitation for all. However, the government is committed to providing safe water to all citizens by 2011. A special fund of $200 million will be created to provide arsenic safe water.”