Clean water basic human right: Engineers

Access to clean water and proper sanitation need to be recognized as basic human rights, according to a panel discussion held at Concordia last Wednesday.
“The human right to water is not recognized within the United Nations system,” said moderator and Concordia University professor Eric Abitbol. “People are interested in promoting the right to water, but it isn’t recognized. It’s not part of the universal declaration for human rights.”
Around 900 million people around the world lack access to clean water, according to Engineers Without Borders, which organized part of the event.
The discussion emphasized that even where water is accessible, much of it isn’t clean and most of the world’s poor do not have access to proper sanitation.
“In sanitation, the poor are often left far behind,” said Ella Lazarte, an Operations Analyst from the Water and Sanitation Program, which is administered by the World Bank.
Financing is not the only challenge when it comes to improving sanitation in developing communities. “The problem also lies in policy and institutions. Their incentives for effective service delivery and accountabilities are very weak in many places,” said Lazarte.
According to Lazarte, lack of sanitation is the second most common cause of death for children worldwide. Two million children die annually from contaminated water.
“In the next hour, about 170 children will die from diarrhea or water-related diseases due to the lack of water and sanitation,” said Lazarte.
But members of non-governmental organizations say they’ve started to make a difference. Camille Dow Baker, president and CEO of the Centre for Affordable Water and Sanitation Technology, said her organization has had an impact.
“People are healthier. They spend less on medications. They can devote more time to work on economic activities,” she said.
Baker said the not-for-profit engineering services her organization provides can create global impacts that begin on the grassroots level. She also stressed the importance of education and training so that affected communities can continue to develop programs independently.
“Environmentally, helping people understand how water becomes contaminated leads to better protection of water resources,” said Baker. “We’re seeing increased mobilization of women and children in the community. About 65 per cent of the 35,000 people trained last year were women and children,” said Baker.
But sanitation issues are often seen as less important than providing access to water, said Luke Brown, who volunteered with Engineers Without Boarders in Ghana.
“Water and sanitation projects in general treat sanitation as an add-on,” said Brown, a law student at McGill. “It’s like the poor little brother to the big brother, which is actually water. So water, the big brother, gets all the attention and the little brother kind of gets left out in the cold.”
This year, the Water and Sanitation Program has developed a “sexy” term for a new strategy being used in hopes of changing attitudes toward sanitation.
“‘Sanitation marketing’ is a behaviour change model looking at attitude change to try and get households to think of sanitation, to link hygiene and sanitation and try to make improvements through different information communication strategies,” said Lazarte.
Even with their different approaches and programs, all panelists agreed that local communities must be able to sustain any new water treatment themselves.
“What you don’t want to do is put in sophisticated systems that people cannot afford because even if the source water is free, you have to pay to treat that water and nobody’s going to subsidize that forever,” said Baker.
“Water is not an isolation,” said Abitbol. “We need to consider the environmental effects, the social effects and the economic effects. They’re all interrelated and they all construct this idea that we have of sustainable development.”