Over 180 million people do not have access to basic drinking
water in countries affected by conflict, violence and instability across the
world, UNICEF warned today, as World Water Week gets under way.
“Children’s access to safe water and sanitation, especially
in conflicts and emergencies, is a right, not a privilege” said Sanjay
Wijesekera, UNICEF’s global chief of water, sanitation and hygiene. ”In
countries beset by violence, displacement, conflict and instability, children’s
most basic means of survival – water – must be a priority.”
People living in fragile situations are four times more
likely to lack basic drinking water than populations in non-fragile situations,
according to a recent UNICEF and World Health Organisation analysis. Of the
estimated 484 million people living in fragile situations in 2015, 183 million
lacked basic drinking water services.
In Yemen, a country reeling from the impact of over two
years of conflict, water supply networks that serve the country’s largest
cities are at imminent risk of collapse due to war-inflicted damage and
disrepair. Around 15 million people in the country have been cut off from
regular access to water and sanitation.
In Syria, where the conflict is well into its seventh year,
around 15 million people are in need of safe water, including an estimated 6.4
million children. Water has frequently been used as a weapon of war: In 2016
alone, there were at least 30 deliberate water cuts – including in Aleppo,
Damascus, Hama, Raqqa and Dara, with pumps destroyed and water sources
contaminated.
In conflict-affected areas in northeast Nigeria, 75 per cent
of water and sanitation infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed, leaving
3.6 million people without even basic water services.
In South Sudan, where fighting has raged for over three
years, almost half the water points across the country have been damaged or
completely destroyed.
“In far too many cases, water and sanitation systems have
been attacked, damaged or left in disrepair to the point of collapse. When
children have no safe water to drink, and when health systems are left in
ruins, malnutrition and potentially fatal diseases like cholera will inevitably
follow,” said Wijesekera.
In Yemen, for example, children make up more than 53 per
cent of the over half a million cases of suspected cholera and acute watery
diarrhoea reported so far. Somalia is
suffering from the largest outbreak of cholera in the last five years, with
nearly 77,000 cases of suspected cholera/acute watery diarrhoea. And in South
Sudan, the cholera outbreak is the most severe the country has ever
experienced, with more than 19,000 cases since June 2016.
In famine-threatened north-east Nigeria, Somalia, South
Sudan and Yemen, nearly 30 million people, including 14.6 million children, are
in urgent need of safe water. More than 5 million children are estimated to be
malnourished this year, with 1.4 million severely so.
Isaac Oyimah/GEE
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