In Search of the Political Will for Water and Sanitation
Today’s blog, written by Jonny Currie and Erica Pool from Medsin, concentrates on our visit with Medsin to Mike Foster at the Department for International Development in London to present the letter that you’ve all been signing. Thanks so much for all your effort; 579 people signed it which is a fantastic response in just a week! In the news today we wanted to bring the health worker protest in Zimbabwe that was broken up by riot police to your attention so do have a read. As ever remember to keep your blogs, articles and viewpoints coming in!
Michael Foster MP with Medsin President Helen Preston, Erica Pool, Jonny Currie, Hannah Barton and Dr. Rhona MacDonald
Happy World Toilet Day! I said this to somebody yesterday slightly disingenuously of course; remembering that 2.6 billion people do not have access to even a basic toilet brings little joy to our hearts. In the International Year of Sanitation, campaigners have been working hard to bring water and sanitation further up the international agenda and ‘in from the cold’ from better-resourced Millennium Development Goals.
Thankfully, we are beginning to see some progress. Governments, particularly the UK, have woken up to the fact that not only does unsafe water, sanitation and poor hygiene account for almost one tenth of the global disease burden; money invested in sanitation reaps enormous economic benefits: for every $1 invested a further $9 are returned through increased productivity and decreased health care usage.
African governments this year adopted the eThekwini Declaration on Sanitation, committing 32 countries to spend at least 0.5% of GDP on sanitation and hygiene. The UK government, through their new Department for International Development (DFID) policy has introduced their ‘Five Ones’ framework, which proposes to release an annual global progress report on the state of water and sanitation, to hold a global high-level meeting each year to review progress and highlight gaps needing to be filled, and to take more action to consolidate efforts at a national level on water and sanitation activities.
With this commitment in mind, members of Medsin and The Lancet Student travelled to meet Michael Foster MP, the Under Secretary of State for International Development, to discuss how progress could be shared between DFID and civil society in meeting the water and sanitation MDGs. Mr Foster spoke very passionately of the need to keep previous promises despite the global economic outlook, and cited the UK’s current contribution of £1 billion over five years to water and sanitation in Africa.
The Under Secretary informed us that country offices in DFID partner countries are to be kept to strict targets on progress, and that the UK will seek to champion water and sanitation as fundamental to global health. He also kindly agreed to raise with Douglas Alexander, the Secretary of State for International Development, that these issues be included and reviewed on the G8 agenda next year, having slipped from last year’s agenda.
The Millennium Development Goals, specifically goal number 7, mandate the international community to half those without access to basic water and sanitation by 2015. At present we are way off track, despite evidence that this is the best investment to make in improving the health of a nation. Is human waste the stigmatised issue in the international development arena? Perhaps. But civil society should strive in its demands for a global action plan for water, sanitation and hygiene, undertaken by a duty-bound global task force. The evidence is clear: now is the time for action.