Recent reports of cholera outbreaks in Turkana and parts of Nyanza are clear indicators that our water quality is compromised and a source of killer diseases.
This year’s World Water Day, whose theme was Clean Water for a Healthy World brought home the painful reality that millions of Kenyans and more than 1 billion people in developing countries are forced to rely on unsafe drinking water.
The water scarcity and deterioration of its quality has been made worse by many factors including Climate Change, Environmental degradation, water pollution, negative impact of urbanization, and lack of water management practices.
Only 3% of the world water is clean and yet only 1% of it is accessible to human use.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon in his message on water day said: “Day after day, we pour millions of tons of untreated sewage, industrial and agriculture wastes into the world’s water system.”
He said clean water has become scarce and will become even scarcer with the onset of climate change. And the poor continue to suffer first and most from pollution, water shortages and the lack of adequate sanitation. There are also fears that more people will die from unsafe water than from all forms of violence, including war.
According to statistics by the by UN-Water, unsafe water causes 4 billion cases of diarrhoea each year and results in 2.2 million deaths, mostly children under five. This means that 15% of child deaths each year are attributable to diarrhoea translating to a child dying every 15 seconds.
Speaking during a meeting organized by UNEP, UN-HABITAT and UN-Water to mark Water Day, Nancy Ross, Director of Communication for the Pacific Institute in the USA, observed:
“Despite humanity reliance on flowing water, our activities severely degraded the quality of rivers and streams, diminishing their ability to provide valuable ecosystem services and driving species to extinction.”
According to her, freshwater ecosystems provide more than biodiversity, and more than US$ 75 billion in goods and services to people.
“The fact is, though that sanitation and drinking water investments have high rates of return; for every US$ 1 invested, there is a projected US$ 3-34 economic development.”
Like in other parts of the world, Kenya too has felt the impact of environmental degradation, climate change and global warming on the quality of water.
This impact has been felt more by women in terms of access to quality water and vulnerability to diseases.
For example in Samburu, because of the impact of Climate Change, the lack of rain in the past one year and early this year has had serious implications on the environmental and people in the region “And if the government can make a priority in investing on quality water and sanitation in the area, some of the deaths we have witnessed might be a thing of the past,” says a wert analysts.
The recurrence of drought in East Africa is a natural calamity that is delivering a serious blow to the region. Scientists blame the massive clearance of forests as well as the emission of carbon gasses into the atmosphere as a cause of the droughts.
And yet to achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015, there is need to invest heavily in poverty reduction and proper environmental management, the very factors that lead to scarcity and poor quality of water.
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