Water has played a crucial part in the history of Budapest. The city has long been renowned throughout the world for its thermal springs and baths, and their healing properties. This link between water and health goes back as far back as history itself, but we are still learning more about this connection to this day.
Only this year, a new academic paper was published that identified how a lack of clean access to water and poor hygiene was affecting the ability of children to absorb nutrients from the food they eat and stunting their growth.
The implications of this are stark. Shockingly, a child under the age of 5 dies every 20 seconds — amounting to 700,000 every year — from diseases brought about by a lack of access to water, sanitation and hygiene, a result of the 768 million people that still don’t have access to safe water, and 2.5 billion people without sanitation.
The organization I work for, WaterAid, has been providing access to water, sanitation and hygiene to the world’s poorest people for over three decades. We’ve been working with communities to build latrines and safe water sources, and changing lives. We have seen remarkable progress during this time.
In the year 2000, governments agreed on a set of eight international goals. The Millennium Development Goals seek to coordinate international efforts toward tackling poverty. With the deadline to their completion less than 750 days away, Hungary has convened the Budapest Water Summit this week to help focus minds on the work still to do as well as what we are yet to achieve.
This attention is hugely welcome. Of all the MDGs, sanitation is one of the most off-track — so much so that at current rates or progress, we will miss the MDG target to reduce by half the proportion of people without a humble toilet, by over a billion people by the end of 2015.
This week, I will be explaining why this is the case, and outlining the route to progress: greater political prioritization, better partnerships and increased financing to be drawn down to deal with this crisis.
WaterAid has identified that the 28 countries accounting for 90 percent of people without basic sanitation has received only 47 percent of water and sanitation aid. While more money targeted toward increasing access to water, sanitation and hygiene is sorely required, we also need to make sure that the aid money that is currently given goes toward those who need it most. Only once everyone has access to clean water, sanitation and hygiene will we have a chance at lifting the crippling weight of extreme poverty.
Hungary is also playing a key role in deciding what will come after the Millennium Development Goals. Hungary’s permanent representative to the United Nations, His Excellency Csaba Kőrösi, will spearhead this effort as co-chair of the open working group that is tasked with bringing together the current negotiations on what the international framework will look like beyond 2015.
This is a heavy responsibility which represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Hungary, a country of less than 10 million people, to help craft and create a better, fairer world for all seven billion of us.
WaterAid welcomes the leadership that Hungary has shown. Just a couple of weeks ago Janos Martoyi, the Hungarian Minister for Foreign Affairs, at the United Nations stated: “Hungary attaches utmost importance to the issue of water and sanitation. We believe that this issue needs to be addressed in an integrated manner to achieve social development, prosperity and ecological balance based on human rights. Water is a source of life, health, prosperity and a shared future but it could also be a source of risks.”
As water ministers from all around the world meet in Budapest this week, Hungary is taking center stage in shaping our future world — a world where people have the chance at a better future and a life out of poverty, where needless deaths from a lack of access to water, sanitation and hygiene could be consigned to the history books.
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About the author
Margaret Batty
Margaret Batty is the Director of Global Policy and Campaigns at WaterAid. She has over 20 years' professional experience working in an international capacity for the voluntary sector, including Age Concern, local government, central government, EU institutions and the United Nations.
