Clean water is as precious as life itself. Given PiCCA’s 2020 and 2021 projects are about water, sanitation and hygiene (or ‘WASH’), we have been thinking about the value of PiCCA’s investments to deliver benefits across all of PiCCA’s priority areas (see ‘About PiCCA’). For example, a toilet saves lives, preventing the spread of disease. It is also a protector of human dignity, improves safety for women and girls and is part of the process of breaking the cycle of poverty for communities across the world. As we know, handwashing prevents the spread of infectious diseases. Applied in home and school settings, spin-off effects include reducing school absences due to illness, thereby improving not just health but children’s futures.
Access to clean and sustainable water, sanitation and hygiene is improving at a global level. However, there are still enormous gaps. This priority area is number 6 of 17 Sustainable Development Goals in recognition that:
- 1 in 4 people lack access to safely managed drinking water services.
- Nearly half the world’s population lack access to safely managed sanitation services.
- 2.3 billion people lack access to basic hygiene services with 670 million having no access to handwashing facilities at all.
- WASH in health care settings should be a non-negotiable but a quarter of the world’s health care facilities do not have basic water services.
- Every day over 1,000 children die due to diseases which could be prevented quite easily with improved water, sanitation and hygiene infrastructure and practice.
For more information, visit un.org/sustainabledevelopment/water-and-sanitation , unwater.org/water-facts/scarcity , and waterpeacesecurity.org
You may also be interested in a TED talk by Rose George, “Let’s talk crap…seriously”: a blunt, funny, powerful, 13-minute talk about a once-unmentionable problem.
