A new analysis from the UN Children’s Fund, UNICEFreleased Monday on the eve of the historic Water Conference, examines household access to water, sanitation and hygiene services, the burden of deaths attributable to water, sanitation and hygiene among children under five, and exposure to climate and environmental risks, revealing where children face the greatest threat, and where investment in solutions to prevent unnecessary deaths is desperately needed.
“Africa is facing a water catastrophe. While climate and water-related crises are escalating around the world, nowhere else in the world are the risks so acute for children,” said the UNICEF Director of Programs .
Likewise, Sanjay Wijesekera assured that “devastating storms, floods and historic droughts are already destroying facilities and homes, contaminating water resources, creating hunger crises and spreading diseases. But difficult as current conditions are, without urgent action, the future It could be a lot darker.”
Crises aggravated by armed conflicts
According to the analysis, the triple threat is most severe in Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Nigeria and Somalia, making West and Central Africa one of the world’s most affected by the water insecurity and climate change. Many of the most affected countries, especially in the Sahel, are also facing the instability and armed conflictfurther aggravating children’s access to safe drinking water and sanitation.
In the 10 most affected countries, almost a third of children do not have access to at least drinking water at home, and two thirds they do not have basic sanitation services. A quarter of children have no choice but to defecate in the open. Hand hygiene is also limited, with three quarters of children unable to wash their hands due to lack of soap and water at home.
As a result, these countries also bear the heaviest burden of child deaths from diseases caused by improper hygienelike diarrheal For example, six of the 10 have suffered cholera outbreaks in the last year. Worldwide, more than 1,000 children under the age of five die every day from water, sanitation and hygiene-related diseases, and around two in five are concentrated in just these 10 countries.
Accelerated action is needed to ensure safe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene for all.
Vulnerable to climate threats
These hotspots are also among the 25% of the world’s 163 countries most at risk of exposure to climate and environmental threats. Higher temperatures, which accelerate the reproduction of pathogensare increasing 1.5 times faster than the global average in parts of West and Central Africa. The groundwater level is also falling., forcing some communities to dig wells twice as deep as just a decade ago. At the same time, rainfall has become more irregular and intense, causing flooding that contaminates scarce water supplies.
The 10 countries are also classified by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as fragile or extremely fragile, and the tensions of armed conflicts in some countries threaten to reverse progress towards safe drinking water and sanitation.
For example, in Burkina Faso, attacks on water facilities have intensified as a tactic to displace communities. 58 water points were attacked in 2022, and more than 830,000 people, more than half of whom are children, lost access to drinking water in the last year.
