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| © UNICEF/HQ92-0120/Colvey |
| Walking home with a jug of clean water in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, India. |
Clean water is the most fundamental necessity for life. Similarly, everyone needs basic sanitation. These things are essential to health and human dignity, and they are your right under the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
But …
• More than a billion people do not have access to safe drinking water.
• More than two and a half billion people do not have a sanitary way of getting rid of excreta (urine and faeces).
• Up to a third of disease globally is thought to be caused by environmental factors such as polluted water and air.
Children are particularly vulnerable to disease. This is because children's bodies are not fully developed, so they have less resistance to illness. Also, in proportion to their weight, young children breathe more air, drink more water and eat more food than adults do, so they take in bigger doses of any contaminants.
Environment, education and poverty
Bad health linked to water and sanitation problems can disrupt your education and stop you reaching your full potential. When you are sick you cannot go to school or learn well. Another reason why many children — particularly girls — miss school is that they have to spend so much time and energy collecting water at home. Yet another reason is that some schools do not have clean water or appropriate sanitation facilities, such as separate latrines for boys and girls, discouraging children from going to school
Poverty underlies all these issues. It is the world's poorest people who have no sanitation and safe water, so it is the poor who are most at risk from water-related diseases. Illness may prevent people from working, making families even poorer. It may also disrupt children's education, so they have fewer chances to learn about water and sanitation, among other things, and fewer opportunities for employment. An ill, poorly educated and unproductive population makes for a poor nation; a poor nation makes for an ill nation. And so on it goes …
Some good news
But there is good news. Action on these problems produces results. In particular, improved sanitation and water sources, combined with information about hygiene and how to prevent infection, dramatically improve the health of communities.
The urgency for this kind of action is recognized in the Millennium Development Goals. Governments have promised to make sure that no development will damage the environment. More specifically, they have committed themselves to halving, by the year 2015, the proportion of people in the world without safe water and ‘improved sanitation’. At current rates of progress, we will miss the sanitation target, but we will meet the water target.
Another piece of good news is that although children are at greater risk from water and sanitation hazards, they are also a powerful force against them. This section of Voices of Youth is about such risks, but it is also about the action young people can take and are taking to reduce them — and about the responsibility of communities and governments to work with young people to protect these fundamental rights.
