SWA, UNICEF, World Leaders and Sanitation

The Sanitation and Water for All partnership (SWA) in collaboration with the UNICEF, would host a meeting on how to stop infectious diseases through investment in water, sanitation and hygiene, as well as through vigorous action on climate change. The meeting, which would be hosted in Jakarta, Indonesia between May 18 and May 19, 2022, would bring together government ministers of finance as well as ministers of water, sanitation, health and climate. The Chief Executive Officer of the SWA, Ms. Catarina de Albuquerque, who announced the meeting in a recent press release, warned that the world is at the risk of another devastating pandemic if governments failed to invest in water and sanitation facilities.  

Albuquerque said: “Leaders and decision-makers have a choice. Our mistakes during COVID-19 have demonstrated the immense cost of inaction, but we have the wisdom to learn from them. We can invest heavily in pandemic prevention and mitigation – including ensuring that communities everywhere have access to clean water and reliable hygiene and sanitation services. Or we can ignore the catastrophic lessons learned, placing the world at grave risk for future public health threats.

“And we do not have to wait for the next pandemic to take action. There are other global health crises happening right now, responsible for the deaths of millions that can be solved by prioritizing the provision of safe water, sanitation and hygiene services.

“From cholera to coronavirus, the message for government leaders is clear: ‘if we want to get ahead of the next pandemic, we must urgently invest in water, sanitation and hygiene.’ To make any other choice could have devastating consequences.” She stated that although “COVD-19 is the deadliest viral outbreak we’ve seen in over a century, but it may not be the last in our lifetime.”

Albuquerque, who served as the first United Nation’s Special Rapporteur on the right to safe drinking water and sanitation, said that “the question of another global health crisis is not if, but when. Yet despite the imminent threat, the 2021 Global Health Security Index estimated that 195 countries remain dangerously unprepared for future pandemics. Additionally, only 33 countries have emergency preparedness and response plans in place that include considerations for vulnerable populations.

“Our collective failure to invest in preventative measures means that when diseases appear they can rage out of control, destroying lives and triggering massive health crises that take decades to resolve.

“We can either allow this information to scare us, or we can use it to prepare us. And one urgent policy solution for preventing disease is universal access to water, sanitation and hygiene.”

She noted that since the leading recommendation for containing a deadly virus is such a simple step as the provision of sanitation, water and good hygiene facilities, it would be “unconscionable to deny one third of the world’s population this basic level of protection. And perhaps the biggest lesson of this pandemic is that our communities are only as healthy as our most vulnerable members.

“Access to clean water is also vital to disease prevention beyond COVID-19. Nearly 1.8 billion people use contaminated drinking water, putting them at risk of contracting cholera, dysentery, polio and typhoid fever.”

She stated that inadequate management of waste was one of the attributing factors of Ebola transmission in West Africa that resulted in the deaths of thousands of people, adding: “the World Health Organization has recommended water and sanitation improvements as a vital first line of defence.” Indeed, our sanitation services are not just vital to stopping the spread of disease, but also to understanding its impact.

 Adeleke Adedipe, Lagos