The July issue of the Bulletin of the World Health Organization has a splendid 1-page editorial: Swimming upstream: why sanitation, hygiene and water are so important to mothers and their daughters by Clarissa Brocklehurst (Chief of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene, UNICEF) and Jamie Bartram (Professor of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Gillings School of Public Health, University of North Carolina). Here’s the final paragraph:
The vicious cycle in which inadequate water, sanitation and hygiene contributes to keeping women in poor health, out of education, in poverty and doomed to bearing sickly children can be reversed. The tools to do this exist. Water, sanitation and hygiene also enable women to play roles in their community’s development, including, of course, decision-making and management of water and sanitation systems.
But read it all!
About Me
- Duncan Mara
- University of Leeds, United Kingdom
- I'm an emeritus professor of civil engineering at the University of Leeds in England. I've been working on low-cost sanitation in developing countries since the mid-1970s, and also on low-cost wastewater treatment and reuse. I was a lecturer at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, 1970-73 and then a senior lecturer at the University of Dundee, Scotland, 1974-79 before moving to Leeds in late 1979. I was a visiting professor of sanitary engineering at the Universidade Federal da Paraiba in Campina Grande, northeast Brazil, during 1976-95, and since 1996 I have been a visiting professor of environmental engineering at the Instituto Cinara, Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia.