Duncan Bannatyne, UNICEF UK Ambassador and star of 'Dragon's Den', recently returned from Bolivia. He met local entrepreneurs who are helping to meet the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) for water and sanitation in hard to reach, rural communities.
Travelling three hours by boat down the Mamore River, Duncan visited the community of San Antonio de Loras with local water entrepreneur Augusto Noe. The UNICEF-supported entrepreneur has drilled over 1,000 water pumps in the last 15 years bringing safe drinking water to thousands of hard to reach children.
Duncan met a little girl, Jandeera, 10, who said she no longer misses school due to ill health as she doesn’t have to collect and drink the polluted river water anymore.
Bolivia, like much of the rest of the world, is on track to achieve the MDG target for clean water. It is thanks to local people like Augusto, who are willing to travel the long and often gruelling distances, that children like Jandeera are part of this achievement.
Bolivia is still off track to meet the MDG target for halving the proportion of people who have access to improved sanitation though.
Duncan visited another rural community called Espiritu Santo where families had recently taken steps to move up the sanitation ladder and become free from open defecation. Speaking to a mother, Teresa, she told Duncan how the children were much healthier since building their basic pit latrine and sick far less often with diarrhoea.
Duncan also visited a local grandmother called Amelia who lost her granddaughter Ana Paola when she was two years old. Diarrhoea is still the biggest killer of children under five in this region. Globally, 4,000 children die every day from diarrhoeal disease brought on by dirty water and poor sanitation.
Diarrhoea not only affects a child’s right to be healthy – it can affect their ability to go to school and get an education. Diarrhoea can also lead to lung infections, malnutrition and anaemia.
UNICEF is working in communities like Espiritu Santo on a project called Community-Led Total Sanitation. Community development workers drive behaviour change from within the villages, mapping where the children and their parents defecate and mobilising the community to decide how to change their defecation habits.
Families decide to build basic pit latrines. This is the first – and most difficult to achieve - step up the “sanitation ladder”. Once a community has become open defecation free though they gain the drive to move to the next level – safer, more hygienic ecological latrines.
UNICEF has plans to train and support local people, like Augusto, in ecological latrine-building so that some of Bolivia’s most vulnerable children can also be part of progress towards the MDG target for sanitation.
UNICEF is so far only working in 16 out of 130 communities in the region though. It’s wrong to only meet the MDGs for some children and not others.
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