Water sanitation is the need of the hour for cleaning water to make it safe for drinking, bathing, cooking, and other uses. Clean water is important to people in every country because of harmful substances in water cause illness and even death.
Clean water issue can be attributed to a number of factors. On this World Water Day, it is important to educate people about it since it is the lack of awareness in the masses that leads to wastage of the limited resource left. Water taps left running, ashes were thrown into rivers, industrial waste and drainage without treatment into rivers are some of the main causes that need our concern.
WASH project started in 2007 which stands for "Water, Sanitation and Hygiene" - several interrelated public health issues that are of particular interest to international development programs. Affordable access to WASH is a key public health issue, especially in developing countries.
Several international development agencies have identified WASH as an area with significant potential to improve health, life expectancy, student learning, gender equality, and other important issues of international development.
The concept of WASH, groups together water, sanitation, and hygiene because the impact of deficiencies in each area overlap strongly and addressing these deficiencies together, can achieve a strong positive impact on public health.
More than half of all primary schools in the developing countries with available data do not have adequate water facilities and nearly two-thirds lack adequate sanitation. Even where facilities exist, they are often in poor condition.
WASH in schools, sometimes significantly reduces hygiene-related disease, increases attendance and contributes to dignity and gender equality. WASH in Schools contributes to healthy, safe and secure school environments for children that can protect them from health hazards, abuse and exclusion. It also enables children to become agents of change for improving water, sanitation and hygiene practices in their families and communities.
Supervised daily group hand washing in schools can be an effective strategy for building hygiene habits, with the potential to0 lead to positive health and education outcomes for children.
Going at this rate, 50 years from now we literally won’t have water to drink. Let’s pledge to conserve water and implement methods to reuse and recycle it.
BW Reporters
The author is a correspondent with BW Businessworld with keen interest in HR and employee welfare.
