As we end the International Year of Sanitation 2008 it’s timely to ask what’s been achieved. Well, no great reduction (if any at all) in the numbers of people needing good sanitation (and ‘good’ = ‘adequate’, not ‘improved’). But this wasn’t really the point of IYS2008. Rather, it was to raise awareness about the truly awful (shocking, shameful, disgraceful − take your pick of adjective) state of sanitation in the developing world today, and this it has done very successfully. At least political leaders can’t now claim to be ignorant about the awful/shocking/shameful/disgraceful state of sanitation in their countries: there’ve been regional sanitation conferences in all parts of the developing world, each with its own Declaration. But the poor need sanitation now, not just politicians talking about it − so we’ll just have to wait and see if there are Actions on the scale required, in addition to all those fine Words.
Isn’t it very extraordinary that politicians in many developing countries still continue to allow their people, in huge numbers, to live without adequate water supplies and adequate sanitation − actually to die in huge numbers because they lack an adequate water supply and adequate sanitation? I wonder if they’ll ever really wake up and face facts. Time is not on the side of the Poor.
This blog will continue into 2009 and beyond...
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.