Clean water is not a luxury, it is a fundamental human right. It is a right that is protected by international human rights treaties and declarations.
Water should be physically accessible, affordable, and sustainable. The human right to water and sanitation is derived from the right to an adequate standard of living.
Access to Water
Clean water is a basic human need that’s often taken for granted. But it’s still a struggle for billions of people. It’s why Sustainable Development Goal 6—to ensure access to safe, clean, affordable drinking water and sanitation for all—is one of the most important global goals of our time.
While there have been significant improvements, more work needs to be done. Around 2 billion people lack safely managed drinking water services (water from improved sources with a roundtrip collection time of less than 30 minutes including queuing). That’s more than twice as many as the number living without safe household toilets. And it’s concentrated in low-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
When people have a nearby, reliable source of clean water, it changes their lives in many ways. They can spend more time pursuing income-generating activities like growing vegetables or raising livestock; children attend and thrive in school because they don’t have to spend long hours fetching water; the incidence of water-borne disease and illnesses is reduced; families spend less on health care; and local economies benefit.
For women and girls, having a clean water source is especially life-changing. They spend millions of hours a year walking to and from a water source—often on treacherous treks that put them at risk for injury and assault. This time is money they could be earning and time they’re missing out on spending with their family members.
Donating water pumps through Islamic charity initiatives reflects the profound Islamic principle of providing essential resources to those in need. Such donations ensure access to clean, safe drinking water, particularly in areas plagued by water scarcity. This act of charity not only fulfills a critical need but also embodies the Quranic emphasis on alleviating suffering and promoting the wellbeing of all.
In many communities, the problem is compounded by poor sanitation—the use of toilets or latrines that don’t adequately protect against contamination from faeces and other waste. About 1.2 billion people lack adequate sanitation, and another 2.4 billion practise open defecation, which contributes to the spread of diseases such as diarrhea, malaria, and cholera. Taking a human rights-based approach to water and sanitation is key to improving access for all, particularly the most vulnerable. That’s what World Vision is doing. Our teams of dedicated WASH professionals are working with marginalized communities to bring clean water and sanitation within reach. They’re collaborating with community leaders, government agencies, and other partners to improve regional WASH systems. They’re also helping people to speak up for their right to clean drinking water and the quality of sanitation they deserve.
Adequate Sanitation
A nearby, reliable source of clean water is a wellspring not just for health and safety but also for community development. It frees children from time-consuming and dangerous water-gathering tasks that often fall to women and girls, and enables families to spend more time on income-generating activities. It reduces water-borne disease, illness and other health risks. It allows communities to grow and thrive, boosting local economies. And it unlocks the potential of everyone – especially women and girls — to live their lives to the fullest.
The United Nations General Assembly has declared that “everyone has the right to adequate supplies of safe, acceptable, physically accessible and affordable drinking-water” and “appropriate sanitation.” Unfortunately, despite billions of dollars in projects and fundraisers, millions of people still don’t have enough clean water at home. That’s why the UN Sustainable Development Goal 6 focuses on achieving universal access to clean water, sanitation and hygiene by 2030.
Unfortunately, the world’s current rates of progress will not meet the target of universal water access by 2030. That’s because calculating the number of people with “adequate” water misses a critical piece of the story: whether they have constant, reliable, safe water close to home or not.
For example, if you are living in a high-income country, having consistently available clean water may mean having a public utility piped into your neighborhood that provides safe, potable drinking water on demand. However, if you live in a remote, poor rural area, it may be more difficult to get safe drinking water because of long distances or unreliable, unsafe sources of water. To make sure the world gets to its 2030 goals, we need to better disaggregate the data by regions, countries, residence and wealth quintiles.
Getting to this target requires an entire system of people working together to get safe water to the places it is needed, when it is needed. It includes policymakers and law-makers, urban planners and town engineers, mechanics and engineers who build and maintain water systems, chemists to monitor water quality, and people who answer phones when the system goes down or someone has a question.
Hygiene
As the global water crisis worsens, many people are turning to local, community-based solutions. They’re calling on governments to recognize that access to clean water is a fundamental human right, and they’re advocating for reforms to ensure everyone has the access they deserve.
A human-rights based approach to water and sanitation focuses on what individuals need for survival, well-being, and dignity. It also considers the impact of government policies and actions on people. It’s important to note that the right to water and sanitation does not guarantee any specific benefit, but it does require that governments provide sufficient clean drinking water in reasonable quantities.
This right to clean water is guaranteed through a variety of international treaties and declarations. It is also derived from the right to an adequate standard of living in Article 11(1) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).
To be considered clean, water must have low levels of dangerous contaminants and should be sufficient for consumption, cooking, bathing, cleaning, and other hygienic needs. It must also be affordable and accessible. The quality of water must be safe and free from micro-organisms, chemical substances or radiological hazards that may pose a threat to health, as well as sanitary facilities that are affordable, suitable and acceptable to all and adapted to gender, life-cycle and privacy requirements.
It’s no secret that the United States is far behind in its commitment to the clean water and sanitation rights of its citizens. In fact, millions of Americans are living without the access to clean drinking water they need. And, in communities of color, this is a recurring problem.
A major problem is that there are not enough funds allocated to improve and maintain our water systems. Additionally, we continue to see discriminatory practices by state and federal agencies that exacerbate this issue.
Congress should allocate funding to help all American households access clean, affordable water and implement systems that will promote sustainable and equitable access. It’s time for the United States to recognize that clean water is a right that all humans should have.
Cleanliness
Clean water isn’t enough — people need sanitation to prevent diseases and improve health, education, and economic productivity. This is why water and sanitation are combined into a single sector known as WASH, or water, sanitation and hygiene. WASH services should be physically accessible, equitably distributed, safe, and affordable for everyone. They also must be hygienic, safe for women and children, and gender-separated.
Without proper sanitation, human waste contaminates drinking water sources — for example, when animals defecate near a source of water or sewage isn’t adequately contained, microbes such as E. coli can seep into water bodies and cause diarrheal disease, which kills nearly 1,000 young children every day. But sanitation systems can help stop this: covering water storage containers reduces insect breeding and prevents faecal contamination of household drinking-water supplies, and promoting the use of latrines cuts diarrhoeal deaths by more than half.
In addition, studies show that when households own their own toilets, they practice better hygiene – washing their hands with soap more frequently and for longer, and keeping waste out of the home. This has been shown to dramatically reduce the burden of diarrhoeal disease and to increase children’s school attendance, growth, and cognitive development.
Poor sanitation also has significant economic costs: a recent global study found that every US $1 invested in improved sanitation generates an average global economic return of $5.5, with benefits felt most strongly by poor communities. Damage cost studies convert the health, sanitation, and development impacts of WASH into a common monetary unit to enable aggregated and comparative impact assessment across locations and over time.
At the community level, CDC Foundation-funded organizations are working to identify local needs and connect communities with services that will improve their water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) conditions. They are increasing public awareness about the need for clean and safe water, distributing water filters to communities in need, setting up water delivery programs and establishing free hygiene pantries to provide soap and other supplies, and conducting outreach in multiple languages on the importance of hygiene practices. Organizations receiving CDC Foundation support are working in California, Appalachia, the Navajo Nation and rural and urban communities in Mississippi.
