WASH news Asia & Pacific

Kathmandu: Many passers-by walking in the city defecate in the open. Kathmandu Metropolitan City (KMC) stated that over 50 per cent passers by defecate on the footpaths despite having the facility of public toilets. “Four years ago, about 1100 people used to use public toilets every day. Number of toilet users have decreased by half at present,” said Rabin Man Shrestha, Chief of Environment Department at KMC.

The KMC stated that the tendency of random defecation has increased due to lack of awareness on sanitation, high fee for using public toilet and lack of knowledge about public toilets in the people who enter Kathmandu city for the first time from different parts of the country.

Read more: NGO Forum / Kantipur, 19 April 2008

China’s quest to make the parched capital green and gleaming by August is taking a devastating toll on the countryside. A canal is being constructed to transport 300 million cubic metres of water from the the drought-stricken province of Hebei to Beijing. It’s all part of the national effort to prepare for the Olympic Games when the water demand in Beijing is expected to rise by about 30 per cent.

More than 20,000 people have been displaced by the canal; local wells have been disrupted; and many here have been left scrambling to scratch out a living.

Read more: Bill Schiller The Star,  12 Apr 2008

In Paris, 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Muhammad Yunus unveiled a deal between his pioneering Grameen Bank and French multinational Veolia Water to provide clean water to poor rural communities in Bangladesh.

The new company, Grameen-Veolia Water Ltd, will be 50% owned by Veolia Water AMI (Africa, Middle East, India) and 50% by Grameen Healthcare (a company doing social business in the areas of health and hygiene) and its mission will be to operate several water treatment and production plants in the poorest villages in Bangladesh.

Grameen-Veolia Water aims to bring drinking water to more than 100 000 people for a total investment estimated at € 500 000. At the end of 2008, the first plant, that is currently in the planning stage, will supply water suitable for cooking and drinking to 25 000 inhabitants of Goalmari, a village 100 km. from Dhaka. All profits will be reinvested in the further development of the project.

Sources: AFP / Yahoo! News, 31 Mar 2008 ; Veolia Water, 31 Mar 2008

Mulin, China — In a farming village in the northeastern part of Beijing, Zhao Chaoyang, a veteran well digger, is face-to-face with what he calls a “natural disaster”: His village is rapidly running out of water.

Without an irrigation system, the town just outside of Beijing’s city center relies on ad-hoc well digging, a practice common in China but one that is in effect reducing its ground water levels year by year.

Read more: Wall Street Journal,

KABUL, 22 January 2008 (IRIN) - About 600 children under five die every day in Afghanistan due to pneumonia, poor nutrition, diarrhoea and other preventable diseases, according to the State of the World’s Children 2008 report released by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on 22 January.

[...]

Poor access to safe drinking water and sanitation is another major cause of death among many Afghan women and children. Only five million Afghans use clean drinking water and 2.6 million have access to sanitation. Pneumonia and diarrhoea are the two most serious diseases among under fives. In Afghanistan [...] 48 percent of those with diarrhoea receive “oral rehydration and continued feeding”. 

Read more: IRIN, 22 Jan 2008 

A workshop was held in Peshawar on 31 March 2008, organised by the Local Government Department, UNICEF and the Human Resources Development Society (HRDS), to develop an action plan for arsenic mitigation in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NFWP).

The action plan called for proper coordination of all stakeholders, appropriate monitoring and awareness raising on arsenic mitigation, and for water treatment plants in risk areas.

Workshop participants included Attiqur Rehman Wazir, deputy secretary of local government, Sabahat Ambreen (UNICEF), Shafqat Ali and Aftab Ahmad (HRDS), and Muhammad Javed (Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Programme - RWSS).

UNICEF is already collaborating with HRDS in the Arsenic Mitigation Project in southern Punjab. Other UNICEF partners working on arsenic mitigation include the Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources and the Sindh Agriculture and Forestry Workers Coordinating Organisation (SAFWCO).

Source: The News (Pakistan)