Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene Africa Water & Sanitation & Hygiene August 2018 | Page 31

Water & Health
With children particularly at risk from water-related
diseases, access to improved sources of water can result
in better health, and therefore better school attendance,
with positive longer-term consequences for their lives.
Challenges
facilities where both patients and staff are placed at
additional risk of infection and disease when water,
sanitation, and hygiene services are lacking. Globally,
15% of patients develop an infection during a hospital
stay, with the proportion much greater in low-income
countries.
Inadequate management of urban, industrial, and
agricultural wastewater means the drinking-water
of hundreds of millions of people is dangerously
contaminated or chemically polluted.
Some 842 000 people are estimated to die each year from
diarrhoea as a result of unsafe drinking-water, sanitation,
and hand hygiene. Yet diarrhoea is largely preventable,
and the deaths of 361 000 children aged under 5 years
could be avoided each year if these risk factors were
addressed. Where water is not readily available, people
may decide handwashing is not a priority, thereby adding
to the likelihood of diarrhoea and other diseases.
Climate change, increasing water scarcity, population
growth, demographic changes and urbanization already
pose challenges for water supply systems. By 2025, half
of the world’s population will be living in water-stressed
areas. Re-use of wastewater, to recover water, nutrients,
or energy, is becoming an important strategy. Increasingly
countries are using wastewater for irrigation – in
developing countries this represents 7% of irrigated land.
While this practice if done inappropriately poses health
risks, safe management of wastewater can yield multiple
benefits, including increased food production.
Options for water sources used for drinking water and
irrigation will continue to evolve, with an increasing
reliance on groundwater and alternative sources,
including wastewater. Climate change will lead to greater
fluctuations in harvested rainwater. Management of
all water resources will need to be improved to ensure
provision and quality.
Survey for SDG data portal
Diarrhoea is the most widely known disease linked to
contaminated food and water but there are other hazards.
Almost 240 million people are affected by schistosomiasis
– an acute and chronic disease caused by parasitic worms
contracted through exposure to infested water.
In many parts of the world, insects that live or breed
in water carry and transmit diseases such as dengue
fever. Some of these insects, known as vectors, breed in
clean, rather than dirty water, and household drinking
water containers can serve as breeding grounds. The
simple intervention of covering water storage containers
can reduce vector breeding and may also reduce faecal
contamination of water at the household level.
Economic and social effects
When water comes from improved and more accessible
sources, people spend less time and effort physically
collecting it, meaning they can be productive in other
ways. This can also result in greater personal safety
by reducing the need to make long or risky journeys
to collect water. Better water sources also mean less
expenditure on health, as people are less likely to fall ill
and incur medical costs, and are better able to remain
economically productive.
To ensure sustainable management of water and
sanitation for all, it is essential to look at the water cycle
in its entirety, including all uses and users. This is exactly
what Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 seeks to
do, covering all the main aspects related to freshwater in
the context of sustainable development.
Through the UN-Water Integrated Monitoring Initiative
for SDG 6, the United Nations compiles country data to
report on global progress towards SDG 6, and seeks to
support countries in monitoring and reporting on water-
and sanitation-related issues in an integrated manner.
As part of the Initiative, UN-Water is developing a new
portal that will gather all data related to the SDG 6 global
indicators. To develop a portal that is as useful as possible
for as many as possible a user survey is currently carried
out to.
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