According to the latest estimates of the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation (JMP), released in early 2013 (collected in 2011), 36 per cent of the world’s population – 2.5 billion people lack improved sanitation facilities, and 768 million people still use unsafe drinking water sources. Inadequate access to safe water and sanitation services, coupled with poor hygiene practices, kills and sickens thousands of children every day, and leads to impoverishment and diminished opportunities for thousands more.
Poor sanitation, water and hygiene have many other serious repercussions. Children – and particularly girls, are denied their right to education because their schools lack private and decent sanitation facilities. Women are forced to spend large parts of their day collecting water. Poor farmers and wage earners are less productive due to illness, health systems are overwhelmed and national economies suffer. Without WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene), sustainable development is impossible.
With the exception of countries such as India which have strong indigenous manufacturing industries and large numbers of private contractors, costs of drilling water wells in developing countries can still be extremely high. It has often been pointed out that the cost of the well can be 10-20 times the cost of the handpump. High unit costs mean that too few wells are drilled to serve a community or district properly, and this is one reason for the under-performance or failure of some programs.
Broadly there are three approaches to well drilling (as opposed to digging) technology. The first is the large, sophisticated (usually hydraulic) drilling rig which is expensive in both capital (typically in excess of US$150 000) and recurrent terms, and complex to manage and maintain in remote areas; with this sort of rig it is almost impossible to achieve low costs per-well, especially in Africa. Costs per well typically exceed US$8 000, even in the case of wells for handpumps.
The second approach is that of the small conventional rig; machines such as small cable-tool rigs, small trailer-mounted hydraulic rigs, or unconventional mechanical rigs provide a significantly lower-cost option which is appropriate to many situations. In this case rig costs are typically US$15-30 000, and wells can be drilled at a real cost of about US$1000-1500
The third approach is that of very low cost, human operated procedures such as hand-augering, hand-percussion, sludging, and wash-boring or well jetting. This group of techniques keeps costs and technical sophistication to a minimum, and applications are inevitably more restricted than with more powerful conventional rigs; nevertheless these techniques have significant potential for both drinking water supply and small irrigation well construction. In this case rig capital cost may be up to US$2000 and well cost a few hundred US dollars.
As sustainable development rises steadily to the forefront of Kenya’s humanitarian agenda in line with the 2015 Millennium Development Goals, improving WASH coverage will be a decisive step towards creating an enabling environment with long-term health improvement as its primary focus.
WOMEN
In much of the world, women and girls are traditionally responsible for domestic water supply and sanitation, and maintaining a hygienic home environment. As managers at the household level, women also have a higher stake in the improvement of water and sanitation services and in sustaining facilities. GDP aims to promote the equal rights of women and girls and to support their full participation in the political, social, and economic development of their communities. GDP works to ensure that women are directly involved in the planning and management of water supply projects, and that hygiene promotion interventions are specifically designed to reach women and girls.
GDP also strives to address the inequities suffered by women and girls related to water and sanitation services. Women and girls bear the burden of collecting water and as a result miss out on opportunities for education, productive activities or leisure time.
Children
Every minute a child in the developing world dies from a water related disease. An estimated 622,000 children die each year from diarrheal diseases globally. 90% of all child deaths of under-fives are water related.
education
Across much of Sub-Saharan Africa, children are forced to miss class while recovering from sicknesses caused by drinking contaminated water. Each year, water-related illnesses like cholera, typhoid, and bacterial diarrhea keep kids out of school for a combined 443 million school days. These absences mean missed lessons, in-class interactions, and poor exam performance.
In addition, many children (mostly girls) miss class or drop out of school entirely because they are needed at home to help haul water. For most, this small task can turn into a full-day chore since the nearest water source may be several kilometers away by foot.
This is why access to clean water is an educational component as essential as school supplies. With a clean-water source nearby, children can spend less time hauling water and recovering from illness and more time in the classroom.
economy
A lack of reliable, clean water access also has deep socio-economic impacts. In total, the World Health Organisation estimates that 140 million working hours are spent collecting water each year in Africa, primarily by women and girls.
The poor gain directly from improved access to basic water and sanitation services through improved health, averted health care costs and time saved. Good management of water resources brings more certainty and efficiency in productivity across economic sectors and contributes to the health of the ecosystem. Taken together, these interventions lead to immediate and long-term economic, social and environmental benefits that make a difference to lives of billions of people.
Investment to improve drinking water, sanitation, hygiene and water resource management systems makes strong economic sense: every dollar invested leads to up to eight dollars in benefits. US$ 84 billion a year could be regained from the yearly investment of US$ 11.3 billion needed to meet the water and sanitation targets under the Millennium Development Goals.
In addition to the value of saved human lives, other benefits include higher economic productivity, more education, and health-care savings.
health
The health burdens attributable to lack of water and sanitation are significant. Yet more people endure the largely preventable effects of water scarcity and poor sanitation than are affected by war, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction combined. These effects are caused by exposure to pathogenic microbes through various routes, which can be summarized in six categories. This large number of categories is an indication of the extent to which water-, sanitation- and hygiene-related diseases can affect populations.
Diseases related to unsafe water, poor sanitation and lack of hygiene are some of the most common causes of illness and death among the poor of developing countries. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 1.6 million deaths each year can be attributed specifically to these health determinants.
Nearly 60% of mortality is linked to infectious diseases, mainly diarrhea, schistosomiasis, trachoma and intestinal helminths. Moreover, other diseases with less mortality, like malaria, filariasis, onchocerciasis, dengue and Japanese encephalitis, are becoming more difficult to manage because of the growing resistance of pathogens to drugs and insects to insecticides.
food shortage
Water is key to food security. Crops and livestock need water to grow. Agriculture requires large quantities of water for irrigation and of good quality for various production processes. While feeding the world and producing a diverse range of non-food crops such as cotton, rubber and industrial oils in an increasingly productive way, agriculture also confirmed its position as the biggest user of water on the globe. Irrigation now claims close to 70 percent of all freshwater appropriated for human use.
Ethnic conflict
Lack of water has played a role in countless conflicts on a sub-national level. The Pacific Institute has documented hundreds of instances of water-related conflict in the past half-century which range from Kenyan tribes clashing over water amidst droughts to riots in South Africa over lack of access to clean water.
As water supply experts Shira Yoffe and Aaron Wolf have noted, scarcity of clean freshwater has contributed to many episodes of acute violence on a small geographic scale across the world, such as bloody conflict between states within India over access to the Kaveri River. Adel Darwish, co-author of Water Wars: Coming Conflicts in the Middle East, has argued that access to water has played a significant role in the Arab-Israeli conflict, including the 1967 war.
More recent conflicts include a hidden element of water scarcity to them. Inter-ethnic conflict in Sudan in the 2000s was also driven by warring over access to clean water. Today, the militant Islamist State group is reportedly using control of water in Iraq and Syria as a tool of war.
excerpt taken from Policy.mic