Water is life, but today water is in danger everywhere because of pollution, scarcity, climate change and 2.6 million human beings, mainly children, die every year from diseases related to unsanitary water.
The NGO SOLIDARITÉS INTERNATIONAL is launching an alert in its 2020 Barometer of Water, Hygiene and Sanitation. The aim of this 6th edition is to establish an inventory, risks and solutions with actors on the ground, experts, reference organizations and personalities on the occasion of World Water Day on March 22 .
This water crisis seriously affects health, agriculture, livestock and food, energy and causes growing tensions between the various users, breeders and farmers, urban and rural.
In 2015, 195 UN member nations voted unanimously on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) including universal access to water in 2030. In 2018, the UN declared that the trajectory was not the right one to get there. And since then, nothing or so little.
The 9th World Water Forum, which will take place in March 2021 in Dakar in Senegal, must be a Forum of rupture, a Forum of responses, especially in sub-Saharan Africa which is the continent most lacking in access to water, drinking water and whose population will double by 2050.
The Dakar Forum must be representative of the most vulnerable populations and of actors involved in the response to the water and sanitation emergency. The Forum must provide concrete responses and must generate an emergency political declaration committing States when 2.2 billion people still do not have secure access to drinking water and 4.2 billion have no access to sanitation.
The world is thirsty, there is no time to wait and no one should be abandoned. It is our mission like that of the Forum.
This text is co-signed by Alain Boinet, founder of the NGO SOLIDARITÉS INTERNATIONAL.
