Clean water a must for the world’s school kids

The number of children in schools worldwide lacking access to safe drinking water and basic toilets and handwashing facilities ranges from 500 million to 900 million, a new joint United Nations agency study has found.

The stark findings in the first ever global assessment of water and sanitation in schools, carried out by the World Health Organization and UNICEF, should sound the alarm to authorities and educators as “back-to-school” season starts.

Over 30 percent of schools worldwide did not provide safe drinking water, affecting around 570 million children. In addition, at least 620 million children lacked a basic sanitation service at their school, defined as an improved single-sex facility that is usable at the time of the survey, according to the assessment report released on Monday.

Besides, nearly half of the schools worldwide lacked proper hand-washing facilities, with water and soap available, which are essential for disease prevention.

To be more specific, at least one in three primary schools and a quarter of secondary schools had no hygiene service, which in all affected nearly 900 million children, according to the “Drinking water, sanitation and hygiene in schools, Global Baseline Report 2018”.

Schools are the places where boys and girls spend most of their daytime, when person-to-person contact can be intense. Inadequate water, sanitation and hygiene conditions could risk exposing them to health hazards, including contagious diseases.

Such conditions can impair children’s ability to learn in several ways, including helminth infections from parasitic worms, which affect hundreds of millions of school-age children, long-term exposure to chemical contaminants such as lead and arsenic, diarrhoeal diseases and malaria outbreaks, the WHO said in an earlier report.

As a result, many schoolchildren are forced to be absent from school, and girls and female teachers are more likely to be affected than boys because, due to the lack of sanitary facilities, they cannot attend school during their menstruations, the report said.

Universal access to basic water, sanitation and hygiene in schools as well as in other settings is part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which was agreed to by all 193 members of the UN General Assembly in 2015.

The agenda resolved to end poverty in all its forms and dimensions and ensure that no one will be left behind in the journey toward realizing sustainable growth.

“If education is the key to helping children escape poverty, access to water and sanitation is key to helping children safely maximize their education,” said Kelly Ann Naylor, global chief of water, sanitation and hygiene at UNICEF.

“To neglect this is to be careless with the well-being and health of children,” Naylor said in a UN news release on Monday.

No one can actually afford to neglect the situation. As Deepak Chopra, an Indianborn American public speaker, put it: “Although we take it for granted, sanitation is a physical measure that has probably done more to increase human life than any kind of drug or surgery.”

It is time that world leaders translated their solemn promise into action.

Though there are a dozen years left to achieve the 2030 goal, time is actually running out, as children can’t wait to grow. They desperately need and deserve quality learning environments with reliable and safe water and hygiene services.

Governments need to make reversing the situation a priority, and as long as they do so, things will change for the better.

“With political will, it really is possible to deliver good quality services,” Rick Johnston of the World Health Organization, a lead researcher on the WHO/UNICEF project, told Reuters on Monday.

Non-governmental organizations, including charities, could also have a big part to play in helping to provide clean water, decent toilet and hand-washing facilities at schools.

Improving water and hygiene conditions on campus could mean a tremendous opportunity for businesses.

In June of last year, China’s quarantine and quality inspection authorities released a list of 24 companies, including A. O. Smith and Hai’er, as the first batch of clean water solution providers recommended for schools in the country’s latest efforts to improve drinking water safety on campuses.