The silent sanitation scandal
Children by an open sewer in Bangladesh
Sanitation has just been voted the greatest medical milestone of the last 150 years in a poll carried out by the British Medical Journal.
Sanitation was voted more important than antibiotics and anaesthesia, emphasising the primacy of sanitation in health issues and reinforcing the case for prioritising sanitation in development funding.
In the developing world 1.8 million children die every year from diarrhoea. 5000 children will die today alone. Unclean water and poor sanitation are the second biggest killers of children and 2.6 billion people worldwide do not have access to basic sanitation.
Britain’s Secretary for International development, Hilary Benn, has made a UK commitment to tackling water-related diseases, yet water and sanitation are still glaringly absent from the 2007 G8 agenda.
When the UN included water and sanitation in its Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), all governments pledged to halve the proportion of people denied their right to clean water and basic sanitation by 2015.
At current funding levels, under-funding for sanitation means the sanitation MDG will not be met until 2105 - ninety years late and at an estimated cost of 133 million lives, the equivalent of the deaths of everyone in the UK and France.
It is clear tackling this crisis should be a priority of the G8 and the wider development community, including political leaders like Gordon Brown. However, the silence persists. Water and sanitation remain low on the political agenda because, as Larry Elliott, the Guardian's economics editor, states in his article Time to wake up and smell the Great Stench, "the issue is a crisis of the poor in general and of women in particular, two constituencies with limited bargaining power."
Gordon Brown's commitment to investing £15 billion into education, in contrast to the meagre £100 million currently invested in water and sanitation, will be wasted without proper investment in water and sanitation projects. 443 million school days are lost every year because children are suffering from water-related diseases.