Press conference by unicef on water and sanitation ‘report card’

At a Headquarters press conference today, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), released its new report “Progress for Children: A Report Card on Water and Sanitation”, which revealed the results of efforts since 1990 to expand access to safe water and basic sanitation worldwide.

Ann Veneman, Executive Director of UNICEF, Maria Mutagamba, Uganda’s Minister of State for Water, Lands and Environment, and Vanessa Tobin, UNICEF’s Deputy Director of Programme Division, briefed correspondents on conclusions in the report and mechanisms used to obtain the data included in the report. The publication, the fifth in a series, charts progress towards Millennium Development Goal 7, which aims to halve the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015.

Ms. Veneman welcomed the participation of Minister Mutagamba, whom she said had travelled to New York overnight to participate in various meetings related to the report’s release.  Ms. Mutagamba chairs the African Ministers Council on Water, an institution founded to promote collaboration, security, the social and economic development and poverty eradication of Member States through the management of water resources and the provision of water supply services. The Minister also chairs the African Ministers Commission on Water and the Women Leaders for Water Sanitation and Hygiene Education.

She also announced that, later today, UNICEF will host a meeting to create a task force for water supply and sanitation, which is bringing together a coalition of partners to advise on how to accelerate progress to reach the 2015 deadline for the Millennium Development Goals.

The new report highlights nine steps to assist in meeting the Millennium Development Goals, including better management and allocation of resources to reach the poorest communities, focusing on low cost sustainable services, and strengthening partnerships to help mobilize commitment.

Using data from 500 surveys and censuses conducted worldwide over the past 25 years, the report found that 88 per cent of the deaths of children under age 5 from diarrhoeal diseases are caused by unsafe water, poor sanitation and lack of hygiene, she said.  That was equivalent to about 4,000 children under 5 dying every day.

Improving education and access to clean water and basic sanitation produces multiple gains, she said.  The provision of water and sanitation at the community level was critical to building survival and booting development.  Young lives might be shortened in households without access to clean water and adequate sanitation facilities.  The good news is that the world was on track to meet the safe water target of the Millennium Development Goals. The report also estimated that 1.2 billion people gained access to improved drinking water sources between the base years of 1990 and 2004, and South Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean would meet the drinking water target 10 years earlier than was estimated.

She said that the projection was that improved sanitation facilities could reduce diarrhoea-related illnesses in children under 5 by more than one third.  Three regions were on target to meet the sanitation goal: the Middle East and North Africa, East Asia, and the Pacific and Latin America and the Caribbean. In South Asia, the proportion of people with access to improved sanitation had more than doubled between 1990 and 2004.   India doubled access to improved sanitation, with coverage now at 33 per cent, and China improved its sanitation figures from 23 per cent to 44 per cent.

As a Government official charged with setting Uganda’s policies on water and the environment, Minister Mutagamba testified that UNICEF’s work in Africa was very pertinent to regional development.

Asked by a reporter to what extent the unresolved conflicts in Africa impeded progress on accessing safe water, the Minister said that various issues impacted general development in Africa and affected children and women especially.  Those were poverty, political strife and climatic changes.  Poverty compounded the vicious cycle of poor sanitation.  Climatic changes, such as reducing available rainfall, affected agriculture and domestic water use.  Lack of water impacted children the most.  Often, they were responsible for fetching water for the family and had to walk long distances to find water, sometimes missing school.  Lack of water particularly affected girls’ school attendance.  Uganda, taking into account the impact of water on children’s lives, had instituted better sanitary facilities in schools, thereby helping to increase girls’ attendance, and it had included the issue of resource conservation into the syllabus in primary schools.

Responding to a question on what action UNICEF was taking to ameliorate the problems in Africa, Ms. Veneman said that work in Africa was critical for UNICEF.  Most of the region would not meet the clean water and sanitation targets established by the Millennium Development Goals.  The situation was worse in sub-Saharan Africa, where only 56 per cent of the population had access to clean water, and 27 per cent had access to sanitation.

On the situation in the Occupied Territories and whether the new task force would be dealing with that region, Vanessa Tobin, said that UNICEF had difficulties knowing if they were on track in the area because of missing data, however, figures from 2004 showed 92 per cent coverage for clean water, and 73 per cent for sanitation.  UNICEF also had a coordinator who worked with non-governmental organizations and other United Nations partners, in terms of the emergency water and sanitation response there.

Asked how UNICEF came to determine which countries were on target and which ones were not, Ms. Veneman said it was important to understand that the target figure measured which countries had reduced by half the proportion of people without clean water and basic sanitation.  Thus, Chad, with a figure of 44 per cent, and India, with a figure of 33 per cent, were listed as reaching the target because they had made incredible progress.

She stressed that there was still a long way to go, with a persistent divide between urban and rural areas. Rural areas exhibited the worst deficit in terms of clean water and sanitation, but UNICEF was pleased with Chad’s improvements in its rural areas.

Asked to elaborate on the report’s statement that, in the Middle East, conflict had been a major impediment to clean water and sanitation, Ms. Tobin said that UNICEF’s work in many countries was in the rural areas, but in the Middle East, the Fund worked in urban areas.  In Lebanon, UNICEF was coordinating the overall emergency response, repairing existing water systems and working with local national and international partners there.

Ms. Veneman said that the report had stressed the difficulties UNICEF had when working in conflict areas, such as in the Sudan, where its staff had a rough time building and maintaining water systems.  In places like Darfur, UNICEF had played a leading role in providing emergency services and bringing clean water and sanitation to refugee camps.

She added that sometimes basic education could save lives.  Hand washing, for example, could reduce diarrhoea diseases by 40 per cent.

Ms. Mutagamba said that combining knowledge and forming a task force had been very useful in Uganda.  In that particular case, the Government had continued to put sanitation on the national agenda, but it never allocated sufficient funds to carry out the necessary policies.  She added that Africa had put the issue of sanitation on the agenda of the African Union.

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For information media • not an official record