Access to clean drinking water and sanitation are fundamental to good health. Yet billions of people still suffer the grave consequences from living without both.
More than 2.5 billion people in the world don’t have a toilet, an additional 1 billion live without clean drinking water.
Sub-Saharan African countries have some of the lowest rates of access to clean water, nearly 40% of families go without.
In Ethiopia less than 25% of the country’s 72 million people have access to safe water and in rural areas the situation is even worse.
Water is a fundamental component of all life, when communities lack clean water health deteriorates.
Every year nearly 1.8 million children die from preventable water born diseases like cholera, typhoid, dysentery or yellow fever. At any given time one half of all people living in the developing world are sick from these diseases. This has a huge impact on already over burdened and under staffed health care systems in most African countries.
But over the last 50 years AMREF has gained extensive experience developing economical and sustainable solutions to the everyday challenges of safe water and sanitation. Our work empowers communities to build and also to maintain clean water systems that are appropriate for their unique needs and conditions.
AMREF has worked with a wide range of communities including nomadic communities in rural Ethiopia, urban slum dwellers in Nairobi and school children in Uganda’s internally displaced person camps.
Through these and other initiatives millions of people have learned that access to clean water and good hygiene lead to better health.
AMREF’s water and sanitation initiatives continue to improve health for thousands of school children and communities across east and southern Africa today, and our successful approach has been replicated in countries around the world.
AMREF Success: PHASE - Personal Hygiene and Sanitation Education – Saving Lives
In the Soroti district of Uganda most primary schools don’t have access to running water. For example, 75% of schools don’t have a place for children to wash their hands and more than half don’t have anywhere to put garbage. There is also a lack of education and awareness on proper hygiene and its impact on health. But the groundbreaking PHASE program is changing this.
Developed in partnership with GlaxoSmithKline, PHASE teaches children the importance of basic sanitation like washing hands. The project also provides the resources needed like clean water sources. Since 2005 PHASE has made an impact in Soroti;
• 98% of schools in Soroti have been visited by PHASE workers who provide immunizations and health education.
• 150 schools in the district now have functioning hand-washing facilities. three times as many students are now regularly washing their hands after using the washroom or before eating
• In Kenya the Ministry of Education has incorporated PHASE into the national school curriculum PHASE has already been successfully replicated in Zambia, Nicaragua, Peru, Bolivia, Mexico, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Tajikistan.
