Water Aid

Ensuring access to clean water water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) is essential. Clean water reduces maternal and infant mortality and the rise of antimicrobial resistance and it helps prevent the spread of disease. Sadly, 1.4 million lives are lost each year due to inadequate water, sanitation and hygiene.

The current Government reduced aid for WASH programmes by more than three quarters between 2018 and 2022. Funding peaked at £206.5 million in 2018 but was £48 million in 2022. The Government’s previous target to provide 60 million people with access to clean water, basic sanitation or hygiene promotion by 2020 was achieved. However, with no new target set, many large WASH programmes were not renewed. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) has also shifted from direct delivery to ensuring that existing WASH facilities are sustainable.

WASH is also critical to other aspects of development. In households without water supplies on the premises, women and girls are more likely to be responsible for fetching it. More young women were not in education, employment or training than in 2015 and every hour a girl spends fetching water is an hour not spent in education. Schools also need clean water and sanitation to meet targets on girls’ education.

One of the UN sustainable development goals is to achieve universal access to safely managed WASH services by 2030. There has been progress. Between 2015 and 2022, 687 million people to safely managed sanitation services and 637 to basic hygiene services. However, in 2022, 2.2 billion people still lacked safely managed drinking water and 3.5 billion people lacked safely managed sanitation. To achieve the WASH services goal, there would need to be a sixfold increase in current global rates of progress for drinking water, fivefold for sanitation and threefold for hygiene.

The UK played a key role in formulating the sustainable development goals. Therefore, I believe the Government has a responsibility to support their achievement. Without a real injection of energy, ambition, co-operation and leadership, there is a real risk that the WASH goal is not met.