How to avoid the daily death of 800 children due to lack of sanitation

11/21/2022 at 4:46 p.m.

TEC


The consequences of the sanitation crisis mean that, in addition to environmental damage, more than 800 children under the age of five die of diarrhea every day, due to the consumption of unsafe water, unsafe sanitation and poor hygiene

Working with local communities is the best way to advance global water sanitation and thus prevent the daily death of 800 children under five years of age from diarrhea associated with unhealthy consumption, according to specialists in this field. Within the list of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) set for 2030, goal number six is ​​”guarantee the availability of water and its sustainable management and sanitation for all” and, further specifying, “guarantee safe toilets for all “.

Carlos Garriga, director of the We Are Water Foundation, acknowledges that it is a “complicated goal to achieve” for that date. Since 2013, the UN has celebrated World Toilet Day in November with the aim of raising awareness about the 3.6 billion people who, according to estimates, cannot access a safe toilet in the world and the 494 million who continue to defecate anywhere at outdoors, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF.

the most vulnerable

In a recent forum dedicated to the sector under the title ‘Making the invisible visible’, Garriga highlighted the “special vulnerability” of girls and women, who “many times wait all day until it is dark and no one sees them to go to the bathroom “, with the security risks that this implies.

In fact, the lack of latrines is the main cause of school dropout for girls in less developed countries, especially when menstruation arrives.

Another problem is that of refugees and those displaced by the violence of armed conflicts, the climate crisis or in search of a better economic situation.

The general director of the humanitarian organization World Vision Spain considers access to water, sanitation and hygiene “one of the key rights” in the context of “armed conflicts, settlements for displaced persons and refugee camps”.

An opinion with which the head of the project department of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Spain, Karmele Sáez, agrees.

He stressed that 1 in 78 people in the world have been forced to leave their homes and estimated that “more than 100 million people” live displaced “because of violence and natural disasters, increased by climate change.”

Finally, the executive director of UNICEF Spain, José María Vera, spoke in this forum about the vulnerability of minors, whom he describes as “the group most susceptible to waterborne diseases”.

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