International Development: Sanitation and Water

Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon Excerpts

Monday 19th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in welcoming this debate and thank the right reverend Prelate for initiating it. He said in his opening remarks that some may find it surprising that he initiated such a debate. The giveaway is in the name of the diocese that he represents: it is entirely appropriate that the Bishop of Bath and Wells should initiate a debate on water.

Some 783 million people live without access to safe water. That represents about 11 per cent of the world’s population. As we heard from other noble Lords, close to 1.3 or 1.4 million children die every year from diseases such as diarrhoea caused by poor sanitation and unclean water. There are 4,000 child deaths a day—or one child every 20 seconds. I am a father of young children. Focus on those numbers for a moment. As my noble friend Lady Jenkin said in her speech, how do we take this basic commodity so much for granted? It is not a privilege but a right that should be available to all.

One in eight people in the world do not have access to safe water. Many women and children in rural areas in developing countries spend hours every day walking many miles to collect water from unprotected, unclean sources: open wells, muddy dug-outs or streams. As I saw when I led a delegation to Bangladesh, in urban areas many collect water from open, polluted waterways or pay high prices to buy what they think is clean and sanitised water. Quite often that water is dirty and unsafe but they have no alternative. Diarrhoeal diseases caused by unsafe water and poor sanitation cause further diseases. Cholera, typhoid and dysentery are common across the developing world.

I will focus on two elements in my brief comments this evening. We all agree without exception that there is an urgent need for action, but all too often while we consistently talk about clean water and sanitation they are overlooked in the global development agenda. It is important that we see the right solution for the right area.

Through my work with charities such as Humanity First, I have seen first-hand what can be done. Humanity First says about water hand pumps that,

“Africa and Asia have many rural villages where the population is typically between 500 to 2,000. For these areas, investment in heavy duty filtration systems is not economic”,

or viable. Bore hand pumps have been installed in 18 countries by this charity, serving 1.2 million villagers. It is important that these specific solutions are sought. Filtration pumps provide another solution in metro areas. On sanitation, where there is regular rainfall, rooftop collection systems may be used,

“to harvest water into tanks which can then be used for taps and sanitary purposes”.

As other noble Lords have said, education is also key. There is no point installing systems if people do not know how to use them. Gravity-fed systems provide another alternative,

“in areas such as Sierra Leone and Uganda where natural dams of water are held in the mountains”.

These can be used by sealing the source dam and piping the water down to feed off to villages. Finally, in the most remote parts of the world, family filtration units can also be used. In the event of disasters specifically, these provide a vital source.

The other element that I briefly wish to focus on is a disease called trachoma, which can ultimately lead to blindness. It is counted by some as a neglected tropical disease. There are 110 million sufferers. It is often carried by children and is transmitted by flies. The root cause of the disease is found in poor sanitation and a general lack of clean water. That allows these flies to fester and carry the disease by landing on young children’s eyelids which then, tragically, turn inwards and cause the eventual blindness of the child. I ask Her Majesty’s Government to outline their commitment to doubling total government investments in water and sanitation to meet the millennium development goal targets of halving the proportions of people living without water and sanitation by 2015.

While we often talk of cures, the diseases linked to lack of sanitation and lack of clean water should never get to that stage. They are not just curable diseases—they are preventable ones. Clean water and sanitation provide the solution and, as I said earlier, clean and safe water is a right, not a privilege.