‘Tearfund is urging the Prime Minister not to let Millennium Development goals on water and sanitation go down the pan.’
Leading Christian relief and development agency Tearfund is urging Prime Minister Gordon Brown to prevent millions of unnecessary deaths by committing to a global action plan to deliver clean water and sanitation.
Billions of people around the world lack even the most basic sanitation or clean water; which is why Tearfund is calling on Mr Brown to lead the international community in urgent action.
Laura Webster, Tearfund’s Senior Policy Advisor on Water said: “The irony on this years World Water Day and in 2008, the UN’s year of sanitation, is that 2.6 billion people are still without sanitation facilities and 1.1 billion others continue to lack safe water.”
Lack of water and sanitation is something that Justice from the Kabale District in south-west Uganda knows all too well – and it has affected his children the most.
Justice said “My children have had to spend hours each day fetching water from the lake; they missed school and got sick because they didn’t have enough water for hand-washing,” he says.
Laura Webster adds: “By the end of today, over 5,000 children under five will have died from diarrhoea- that’s 1.8 million children every year. These deaths can be prevented by those in power. We are asking Mr Brown to take a strong lead and urge the international community to give communities in developing countries their basic fundamental rights and to ultimately ensure their survival.”
A recent Tearfund report called The Sanitation Scandal noted that over 70 countries are in no way able to meet the Millennium Development goals of halving those without sanitation by 2015, and with climate change making rainfall patterns more irregular, there has never been a more pressing time to provide clean water resources and proper sanitation for poor communities.
As part of End Water Poverty Coalition, Tearfund was also joint signatory to an open letter to Mr Brown in the national press last week asking the Prime Minister to highlight the issue when G8 meet in Japan in July.