Recently released findings by the international charity WaterAid, show that there are more people in the world today lacking adequate sanitation services than in 1990.
The report shows that unless urgent action is taken, but nearly all governments in Sub-Saharan African will fail to meet the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) pledge they made to halve the proportion of people without sanitation by 2015.
On the current trajectory, it will take over two centuries for Sub-Saharan Africa to meet its sanitation MDG target.
According to Nshuti Rugerinyange, WaterAid’s Country Representative in Rwanda, every year thousands of children die in Rwanda due to a lack of adequate sanitation and clean water.
He says, “This is the true cost we bear from the failure to ensure basic water and sanitation services. The Government should increase the level of spending on water and sanitation, and donors increase their pledge of aid they spend on water and sanitation, if we want to turn this situation around.”
The report further states that to get the sanitation and water MDGs back on track, countries in sub-Saharan Africa need to spend at least 3.5% of gross domestic product (GDP) on WASH services.
9,305 children died from diarrhea in 2008 in Rwanda, according to Child Health Epidemiology reference group of WHO and UNICEF, lancet 2010. Rwanda has one of the highest under-five mortality rates.
In the two weeks prior to the country’s last Demographic Household Survey (DHS), 13.7% of children under the age of five had had diarrhea.
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