International Development: Sanitation and Water

Baroness Jenkin of Kennington Excerpts

Monday 19th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jenkin of Kennington]

My Lords, like many other noble Lords, while preparing for this debate I thought about water every time I turned on a tap, filled a kettle, flushed the loo, ran a bath or a shower: simple things that we all do every day without thinking about it. Tomorrow, however, and perhaps the day after, we will all go back to taking for granted the miracle that is fresh, clean running water.

We owe the right reverend Prelate thanks for initiating this debate and for reminding us of our luck. In 1880, when we here in Britain revolutionised the infrastructure of water and sanitation, life expectancy for the average Briton rose by 15 years. Working towards improved sanitation for the billions of people currently without it will lead to similar improvements across the world.

In the last 20 years, between 1990 and 2010, over 2 billion people gained access to improved water sources and 1.8 billion people gained access to improved sanitation facilities. Globally, though, 783 million people—11 per cent of the world's population—are still without safe drinking water and 2.5 billion without sanitation, so, as the right reverend Prelate said, there is still much to do.

Water and sanitation are rightly high on the aid agenda. I am delighted that the UK and DfID are leading the way by showing commitment to ensuring that clean water and sanitation get to more people globally than in the whole of the UK. As the right reverend Prelate said, we welcome the Secretary of State’s decision to attend the high-level meeting on sanitation and water in Washington this April.

It is important, however, to note that progress is not just about access to clean drinking water. Hygienic toilets, education in sanitation, and effective hand washing really do save lives. Anyone who works for a water charity will tell you that access to water is not about stopping dehydration; it builds communities. By building a latrine and sanitation block in a school, attendance, particularly for girls, can double. When Wells for India, a UK-based charity, builds such facilities it always give preference to girls to attend the school, because by lifting barriers that keep girls out of school they are given a real chance to take control of their lives, from reproductive choices to education and economic control. For example, girls are far more likely to attend school when there are private and safe facilities for adolescent girls during menstruation. The availability of sanitation services at school can directly impact the drop-out rate of girls from full-time education. By increasing these amenities, we can dramatically improve the opportunities for these young girls.

Women are helped in a multitude of ways by increased access to water and sanitation. For example, going to the toilet in the open puts them in danger of being assaulted. In Bhopal, WaterAid has spoken to women who forgo food and drink during the day to avoid needing to defecate in the open in daylight. By waiting until nightfall they then place themselves at greater risk of sexual violence.

Water aid charities rightly focus on new technology for harvesting water. From gully plugs to loose stone dams and trenches, there are lots of cheap ways to harvest water. Even turning a flat roof on a house—such a common feature—into a pipe for siphoning rainwater into a tank makes the type of difference we can hardly imagine.

Poor families in sub-Saharan Africa spend around 11 per cent of their income on water. Money donated to increase access to water is extremely cost-effective—£385 can build a sanitation block for 150 people. Donating the materials to turn open-water wells—in which the water is likely to become infected—into closed, pump-using wells is astonishingly cheap; again, a small act which makes a huge difference.

Just this afternoon, I bumped into someone who told me about the role of crushed seeds of the moringa tree in clarifying and purifying water to make it safe for drinking and to suit domestic use. I rushed to my desk to investigate this magic seed further. One billion people across Asia, Africa, and Latin America are estimated to rely on untreated surface water sources for their daily water needs. Of these, some 2 million are thought to die from diseases caught from contaminated water every year, with the majority of these deaths occurring among children under five years of age.

Moringa oleifera is a vegetable tree grown in Africa, Central America, South America, the Indian subcontinent, and south-east Asia. It could be considered to be one of the world’s most useful trees. Not only is it drought resistant, it also yields cooking and lighting oil and soil fertilizer, as well as highly nutritious food in the form of its pods, leaves, seeds and flowers. However, perhaps most importantly, its seeds can be used to purify drinking water at virtually no cost. Moringa tree seeds, when crushed into powder, can be used as a water-soluble extract in suspension, resulting in an effective natural clarification agent for highly turbid and untreated pathogenic surface water—dirty river water to me. As well as improving drinkability, this technique reduces water turbidity—or cloudiness—making the result aesthetically, as well as microbiologically, more acceptable for human consumption, removing between 90 and 99 per cent of bacteria. Despite its life-saving potential, the technique is not widely known, even in areas where the moringa is routinely cultivated.

North Africa, which comprises 20 per cent of all land in Africa, receives less than a third of the continent’s total annual rainfall—an extremely small and unpredictable amount. For a continent that is so highly dependent on rain-fed agriculture, it is important not only to harvest as much rain as possible but to be able to predict when this rain will fall. In the UK there are 4,400 weather stations, at a rate of one per seven square kilometres. By comparison, in the whole of Africa there are 1,152 weather stations—roughly one per 26,000 square kilometres. In a continent where rainfall is so variable, it is impossible for farmers to know simple things, such as when to water their crops. Understanding rain dynamics, from daily to monthly scales, would strengthen early warning systems and help people such as subsistence farmers to make informed decisions on matters such as crop planting and storage.

I thank the right reverend Prelate for securing this important debate. Although I welcome the significant progress that has been made, like the right reverend Prelate, I believe it is imperative to stress that reaching the sanitation goal is still some way off. The fact that DfID is now putting such emphasis on water and sanitation is much to be welcomed and I hope that its work continues to go from strength to strength.