Procuring supplies for children
Water & sanitation
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| © UNICEF/HQ07-1913/Noorani |
| Parul carries her baby daughter and a UNICEF family kit in the village of Gorjun Bunia in Bangladesh after the floods. |
One of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals is to reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water. As 1.1 billion people still do not have access to safe water, this is an enormous task. Supplies are an important component of water and sanitation programmes, and UNICEF spent over $72 million on water, environment and sanitation (WES) supplies in 2008. The trend is to use water and sanitation equipment for pilot projects at the community level, and encourage communities and local governments to take over the procurement of equipment and supplies.
Research provides evidence that simple, acceptable low cost interventions at the household level can dramatically improve the water quality of domestic stored water. Similarly, UNICEF Country Offices have been encouraged to use locally available services to drill wells instead of buying expensive and complex drilling equipment.
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| © UNICEF/KP04-001/Kent Page |
| A young boy and girl point at a sign indicating separate latrines for boys and girls. These sanitary facilities have been built in a UNICEF-supported school in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo. |
In the context of education, UNICEF’s experience shows that providing water and sanitation facilities to boys and girls in school is also one of the key interventions for girls’ education helping them to stay longer. School sanitation has become a focus area in many countries, proving to be an efficient way to enhance hygiene and sanitation within school but also the family. UNICEF has also developed a basic family water kit for use in emergencies. The kit, designed to cover the needs of 10 families contains buckets, soap, water containers, water purification tablets and disinfectant.
To see Request for Expression of Interest for water and sanitation supplies, click here.
UNICEF Supply Catalogue
The UNICEF Supply Catalogue contains specifications for some 2,000 commodities based on the long experience of UNICEF Supply Division.
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