World Toilet Day!
Today is World Toilet Day, a chance to highlight the global water and sanitation shortfall, and the last day of our week of blogs on water and sanitation. Following on from Steve’s blog on Monday about campaigning on these issues, we talk a bit about what you, as students and members of civil society, can do. To all you veteran campaigners who already know how to spread a message – use your skills to advocate for water and sanitation! The facts and the technology are already out there, what’s lacking is people to really champion this issue, especially in a health context! Today is also the last chance to get your name on the letter going out to Gordon Brown and Douglas Alexander (sign up through the Medsin site or follow the instructions on our previous blog), as we’ll be closing it at 6pm London time to hastily cut and paste all the names before our meeting at DFID tomorrow – we’ll have more on that later this week. We’re hoping to exceed our target so please please sign if you haven’t already. We’ve also posted a great article by Andrey Ostrovsky on the difficulties of providing appropriate training for work in global health and the importance of health systems strengthening, which is well worth a read.
WHAT YOU CAN DO!
Raise awareness – water and sanitation really needs championing, especially among medical students, and there’s lots that can be done, from talking to friends, shout-outs in lectures, publicity stunts to organising speaker events and discussing with other students about how to take action. Two of the major umbrella organisations that we’d direct you to are End Water Poverty and the World Toilet Organisation. These are both international coalitions of numerous NGOs acting on water and sanitation and are great for campaigning resources and current information. It’s probably easier to get involved with a single organisation in which case check out the EWP member list for water and sanitation groups operating in your country. There are also some smaller, national coalition groups about such as the Canadian Sanitation and Water Action Network which lobbies for more government focus on water and sanitation on behalf of member NGOs. Wateraid is an international organisation offering lots of opportunities for campaigning and involvement, so well worth a look.
Stay informed – We hope that you know more about water and sanitation after our themed week here at the Lancet Student but in any case, it’s important to keep up to date on the latest developments. We’ll try and do that here but we’d really recommend EWP for that as well.
Campaign! – Getting the message out to the people in power, as well as the public, can make a big difference, which is what we’ve been trying to do with the letter to Gordon Brown and Douglas Alexander. Take a bit of time to write to your MP or local politician about prioritising water and sanitation in development. Get the information out there by writing for a local newspaper or student magazine.
Raise money for water/sanitation charities – fundraisers, sponsored events etc. Also since it’s Christmas soon, consider giving your more ethically-minded friends and family water and sanitation related gifts! Check out the Wateraid shop or the list of Oxfam country-specific sites where you can gift money towards setting up water pumps and toilets in unserved areas.