2016 Social Progress Index and WASH

Water is the most basic of basic human needs. Without it humans can last barely three days.

Yet too often we take it for granted. Approximately 884 million people worldwide still do not have regular access to safe drinking water and approximately 2.4 billion people live without improved sanitation facilities.

The implications of this go far beyond thirst or hygiene.

Failure to provide water or adequate sanitation results in approximately 842,000 deaths per year. And over two-fifths of these deaths are of children under age five, an appalling figure.

It is not only children’s’ health at stake. Estimates found that simply meeting a Millennium Development Goals on water, which aimed to halve the number of people without access to safe water and sustainable sanitation, would have resulted in 272 million more days in school due to reduced absenteeism.

‘Water and Sanitation’ is one of the twelve components which make up the Social Progress Index which launched last month. But as we can see it affects many other components too – health, basic education and the quality of the environment.

 Water and sanitation is a fundamental building block of social progress – without it little social OR economic development can take place.

While there are still considerable risks - water withdrawals are set to increase by 50% in the developing world by 2025– I believe there are reasons for hope that water and sanitation provision around the world will improve.

1. We have a Sustainable Development Goal dedicated to addressing Water and Sanitation. There has also been broad acknowledgment that without meeting Goal 6 in particular, it will be difficult to achieve the other 17.

2. Greater access to technology will help developing countries scale solutions and monitor progress. While individual country scorecards from the Social Progress Index show that countries in Sub-Saharan Africa are most likely to register water and sanitation as a weakness, there are regional out-performers such as Ghana. Its SMARTerWASH initiative is combining the IT systems and the relative abundance of smartphone technology in the country to create a monitoring system that benefits over 11 million water users.

3. Business increasingly understands the importance of WASH (Water, Hygiene and Sanitation) issues in terms of reputational risk, supply chain management and their licence to operate in a community. An example comes directly from SPI (the non-profit behind the Index). In 2014, Coca Cola and Natura commissioned a community social progress index to understand the issues faced by those living in Brazil’s Amazon region. They were concerned at the high level of poverty among farmers in the region who are critical in the Acai berry supply chain. Among other social challenges, the Index revealed a hidden water challenge the region faced, particularly the disparity between water access in urban and rural areas. A partnership signed in early 2015 with the Ministry of Social Development and Combatting Hunger (MDS) brought the sanitation project SANEAR AMAZONIA to Amazon communities in Território Médio Juruá. The project will work to build basic sanitation infrastructure and provide access to drinking water for 500 households in the region, helping to secure both supply chains and the social progress of the local community.

While progress since the launch of the SDGs has been encouraging there is still much to do to improve social well-being with regards to WASH in both developing and developed countries. And we won’t progress far if we continue to take water for granted.

It’s time for all of us to see WASH as a cornerstone of development and social progress.