Clean Water and Sanitation (Africa)

Debate between Diane Abbott and Pauline Latham

Thursday 21st April 2016 Westminster Hall

[Pauline Latham]

Just this once, it was not the hon. Gentleman’s accent that confused me, but the fact I could not hear. That is my problem, and I apologise.

Clean water is one of the fundamental things that we expect to have. In this country, we have had it for donkey’s years. but we recently saw the problems in the north-west when water was contaminated for some time. One suddenly realised how much we take it for granted in this country that we can wash and use the washing machine and probably the dishwasher. We can have a shower or bath or clean our teeth with no worries at all. That incident showed the population of Britain that we use a huge amount of water without thinking about it.

For those in a developing country—we know that almost a third of the global population lack access to sanitation facilities and more than 660 million people lack access to clean water—it is a daily problem that they have to live with and deal with. We see so many young people dying under the age of five because they do not have access to clean water or sanitation. We and many other countries accept water as something that we can use at any time, and we should be looking to help the countries affected. Other countries have to look themselves at improving clean water facilities, but it is incredibly difficult. Where does a President or a Government start if people have no decent housing, no clean water, no or few sanitation facilities, no education and no good health facilities?

Without clean water, people cannot have access to education or decent healthcare. I have seen some hospitals where there is no running water—how can a hospital facility have no running water? How can things be kept clean? Even in the Crimean war, Florence Nightingale understood that the one thing needed in a hospital is cleanliness and sanitation. That was a very long time ago, but some countries in Africa do not have that facility, and that is totally shocking.

I am pleased to see that sustainable development goal 6 is the aim of achieving universal access to safe water and sanitation by 2030, but 2030 is not very far away—only 14 years. We have been involved in international development for many years, as have many other countries, non-governmental organisations, charities and individuals, along with diaspora communities that send money back. Why do some Governments appear to have little will to install decent water facilities? It is not difficult to do; it just needs a comprehensive plan.

As a member of the Select Committee on International Development, I have visited many countries in Africa where I have been shocked by the poor facilities that people have to live with. For instance, when we went on a visit to Burundi, we were embedded in a house right out in the sticks for 24 hours with no water and no sanitation. The only place to go to the toilet was where they had literally dug a hole specifically for me to go in. I found that rather embarrassing—not for me, but for them to have to do that. They did it, though, and the joke was that they made a wooden box for me to sit on so that I would not have to squat. They thought that as a westerner, I would not have been able to cope with that. It would not have bothered me, but they have to deal with that all the time, and I do not know that things are that much better now in Burundi. There are a lot of other problems there, but when there is conflict in an area, it makes things harder still, and not just for the people living there. How do Governments, if they are in conflict and there is a civil war, or whatever the situation is, deal with the country’s problems with water and sanitation?

I have spent a lot of my time in Uganda with a friend of mine who was a Member of Parliament there. Sadly, he lost at the last election; I do not think it was quite fair. He was very keen on helping his community have sanitation and water as well as decent health. He is a doctor, so he is very keen on health facilities, but he was struggling. I was able to go to Uganda at the beginning of this year, and I saw for myself the problems with malaria. There is no clean water. I went to a hospital that had no sheets on the bed. The parents and family members who had to go to that hospital with their children had nowhere to go to the loo. It was a state-run hospital, and I think that situation is pretty appalling. Some of the children who were in the hospitals I went to did not have malaria. They might have had dysentery or diarrhoea, which are relatively easy to cure if there is clean water and the right medication.

[Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)]

The hon. Lady made an interesting reference to the pit latrine that she encountered in Burundi, but does she agree that those are the least of the problem? Within memory, people in this country had to use toilets at the bottom of their garden or chamber pots. Part of the problem is that there are too many parts of the world where people are still accustomed to defecating in the open, in fields, with all the hygiene problems that that causes.

[Pauline Latham]

I was going to mention that problem. I well remember living in Lincolnshire as a child and having to go down the garden to the toilet. There was a large seat for the adults and a small seat for the children. I did not mind doing that, because I had not known anything different. Of course, at night we had a chamber pot, and when it was freezing cold it was frozen in the morning. That is not that many years ago; I know I am old, but I am not as old as the Queen, although I suspect she never went down the garden to the loo. Nevertheless, I remember doing that, and it was something that one lived with. I remember having a tin bath in front of the fire with everybody around me—there was no hot water upstairs. I was tiny, but I do remember it. It has not been that many years since we solved the problem, but we have solved it.

As the hon. Lady says, one problem is open defecation. I described the hole in the ground in Burundi, and it was a tiny hole just for me, not for anyone else. The problem with open defecation is that people have to go into the bushes to get some privacy, so they are at risk of rape and all sorts of violence. Of course, when the rains come, all the sewage is washed through the villages, which is one of the biggest problems in many places. When the Select Committee went to South Sudan, we saw that was happening. The people in the refugee camp who had been told to leave Sudan and go to South Sudan—although they and previous generations had never lived there, they were considered South Sudanese, so they had to go and had walked there—had no toilet facilities and no water. People can go to collect water, but toilet facilities are a basic human right and everybody should have them. It is a huge problem.