Water and Sanitation Not Core MDG Objective

Water is a vital resource, and we at Food & Water Watch work to keep this resource publicly owned and accessible to all, whether in rich countries or poor. This week, however, focus was on the world’s poorest, as leaders met in New York to discuss the Millennium Development Goals.

Food & Water Watch Board Chair Maude Barlow—a former advisor to the UN on water—believes that access to safe drinking water and sanitation should be critical to the objectives of the Millennium Development Goals.

These goals broadly aim to reduce poverty, with specific objectives including reducing hunger, providing universal education, gender equality and ending HIV/AIDS. Food & Water Watch Board Chair Maude Barlow—a former advisor to the UN on water— reminds points out that access to water is central to all of those goals, but absent from the core list.

Water and sanitation is actually listed as a target under the broader goal for environmental sustainability. Barlow and other water activists hope to cut the proportion of the population that lacks access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015. Currently, over 900 million people lack access to drinking water and 2.6 billion people do not have access to adequate sanitation.

“Without clean water, the other millennium development goals cannot be reached. Every eight seconds a child dies from lack of water or waterborne disease. Unsafe water and sanitation are the source of 85 percent of preventable diseases. Without access to water and sanitation, we cannot meet the millennium development goal of reducing child mortality,” says Barlow.

-Darcey Rakestraw