COVID-19/WATER

Hand-washing campaigns top the list of national interventions. This has put a magnifying glass on issues of water security and safe sanitation access public sector and huge focus in the private sector. This must be the right time to engage in catalytic actions to leap-frog the current system constraints to universal access to safe water and sanitation with concomitant, smarter, eco-friendly waste and wastewater treatment. This should be complemented by the industrialisation of the beneficiation of waste and wastewater to produce fertilizers, energy, high value chemicals, lipids and proteins. These actions will prove transformative—economically, socially and environmentally.

To make this a reality, there are some critical success factors. Firstly, we have to heighten our efforts to translate the vast repository of scientific and technological knowledge in this domain to tangible products and services for immediate use on the ground. There will have to be substantive support to product and business development and an overhaul of our archaic regulatory rules and operating procedures. Secondly, we need new economic models to effect large-scale implementation and sustainable operations and maintenance. Thirdly, we need to bolster our partnerships between science and society, governments and business, local and international. COVID-19 has introduced a ray of hope for new global solidarity. It has emphasised that we are unarguably friends in need, let us become friends in deed!