Safe drinking water and sanitation: only 9 Arab countries are safe

Drinking water and sanitation is the title of the second episode in the series of articles we are publishing on health and the environment in Arab countries. This article is based on the chapter on the subject in the recent report of the Arab Forum for Environment and Development (AFED). The chapter was written by Dr May Al-Jirdi, professor of environmental health at the American University of Beirut, with Dr Jomana Nasr, lecturer at the College of Health Sciences, and Rola Ajeeb, supervisor of the laboratory of environmental health at AUB.

Water, sanitation and hygiene services play an essential role in the fight against emerging diseases, as confirmed by the successive appeals that the World Health Organization is currently making to provide safe drinking water and sanitation and hygiene services to contain the spread of the emerging Corona virus.

In mid-2010, the United Nations General Assembly issued a resolution declaring access to safe drinking water and sanitation services as a human right, as it is closely linked to the right to life. and human dignity. The United Nations has also adopted the issue of water and sanitation as one of the Sustainable Development Goals (Goal 6), which calls for the provision of safe drinking water and basic sanitation services to all. by 2030.

In the Arab world, the Arab League endorsed the Arab Water Security Strategy for 2030 in 2012. It noted the close relationship between water, energy and food. However, these global and regional policies still have not achieved their ambitious goals in all developing countries, including middle- and low-income Arab countries.

The report “Health and Environment”, recently published by the Arab Forum for Environment and Development (AFED), examines the main environmental factors that have a major impact on various aspects of human health in Arab countries, including water and sanitation problems.

For example, the World Health Organization considers diarrheal diseases to be the leading cause of death in children under five, accounting for 20% of all deaths. Unsafe water and untreated sewage, along with poor hygiene, poor nutrition and climate change, are the most important factors in the increase and prevalence of diarrhea in middle and middle income countries. low.

While the number of deaths from diarrhea worldwide reached 842,000 deaths in 2014. The number of deaths from diarrheal diseases linked to water, sanitation and hygiene services in the Arab world was around 29,000 deaths in 2016.

Arab water is in decline and its quality is deteriorating

According to the General Burden of Disease Scale, expressed as years of life lost due to ill health, disability or premature death, the years of healthy life lost globally Arab disease due to diarrhea were close to 2.4 million years in 2016. Most of them are found in Somalia, Mauritania, Comoros, Djibouti, Yemen and Sudan. Proportion to the population.

On the other hand, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Emirates and Saudi Arabia enjoy safe management and wide coverage of drinking water and sanitation services, while pollution exposure, exposure to chemical pollutants, and determinants of environmental and housing damage remain the most important environmental risk factors in these countries.

In other Arab countries, which account for about 57 percent of the Arab population, environmental risks related to water, sanitation, air pollution, exposure to chemicals, waste and food contamination increase the burden resulting from infectious and non-communicable diseases.

The Arab region is among the regions most vulnerable to water stress in the world, due to limited renewable resources and the overexploitation of available resources. The 14 poorest water countries in the world are located in the Arab region. This reality is compounded by climate change, steady population growth, dependence on shared or transboundary water resources, and weak water governance.

The AFED report considers water scarcity as a critical challenge, reinforced by the mismanagement of water resources, including the poor assessment of water resources in terms of quantity and quality. This scarcity also negatively affects the development and sustainability of drinking water and sanitation services.

Available figures indicate that around 90 percent of Arab citizens have access to safe drinking water, a percentage close to the world average. However, there is a need to develop sustainable programs to monitor water quality, as a direct indicator of its physical, chemical and biological safety.

Sanitation and reuse

Safely managed sanitation services are available for almost 29% of Arab citizens, which is low compared to the global average of 45%. Kuwaitis have the broadest coverage of access to drinking water and 100% sanitation services, and these ratios in Lebanon drop to 48% for safe water and 22% for adequate sanitation.

The disparities are not limited to rich and low-income countries, but also include rural and urban areas within the same country. It should be noted that the poorest rural areas have the least access to drinking water and sanitation services.

Kuwait also stands out by treating all of its sanitary drainage, and its competition with the Emirates is close to 99%. While the percentage of wastewater treated in Mauritania is less than 0.7%, the rates of wastewater treatment in other Arab countries vary between less than 50% in Lebanon, Libya, Algeria, Iraq and Morocco. , and more than 50% in Egypt, Palestine, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Jordan.

Wastewater treatment and reuse is essential to ensure the water supply in most Arab countries, especially with climate change and increasing demand due to population growth. In GCC countries, it is well established that wastewater treatment and reuse is essential to supply water in order to reduce the financial and environmental burden of desalination.

Water aid to 17 countries

Regarding development assistance in the water and sanitation sector, 17 Arab countries received $ 1.6 billion in grants in 2017. This is a good percentage compared to the total. Global official development assistance for the sector, amounting to $ 8.8 billion, from which 136 countries benefited. Jordan’s share was the highest in the Arab world, with more than half a billion dollars in grants.

Although external development grants represent a fraction of global spending in the water and sanitation sector, the amounts received by some countries have been impressive. The donation of approximately $ 58 million in official development assistance that Mauritania received represented nearly 60 percent of the country’s expenditure in this sector.

In general, this aid remains insufficient to achieve the national objectives concerning the sixth development objective linked to drinking water and sanitation. Assessing the gap between available funding and water, sanitation and hygiene needs, the gap was 68% in Lebanon and 47% in Palestine in 2017.

The “Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals” report for the year 2019 indicates that only 9 Arab countries, including Jordan, Tunisia and Lebanon, as well as the Gulf States, are on track to achieve the sixth goal. of development. Meanwhile, the rest of the countries in the region are experiencing stagnation or moderate progress towards achieving this goal.

Poverty represents the most important challenge to achieve the sixth development goal, as it hinders the provision of adequate infrastructure and interferes with political instability, widespread corruption, multiple ethnic conflicts, climate change and other factors. of human origin.

Conflicts also prevent the achievement of the sixth development goal. In Iraq, Libya, Palestine, Somalia and Sudan, drinking water and sanitation facilities have been severely damaged by the war. The displacement has also put great pressure on the infrastructure of host countries, which are already weak and have limited resources.

Water pollution is a major threat in Arab countries with limited water resources, and this threat is compounded by unsustainable urban projects, population growth and climate change. Water scarcity forces many countries to resort to unconventional water resources, such as seawater desalination, with its high costs and significant environmental impacts. The growing demand in the Gulf countries has led to the overexploitation of aquifers.

Other problems hampering progress towards the achievement of the sixth development goal include weak water governance, lack of integrated water resources management, inability to develop programs that integrate water , sanitation and hygiene to ensure public health, lack of public participation in the water sector and limited political and financial commitment.

The AFED report concludes that the achievement of the sixth development objective is not only a public interest, but rather a milestone towards the development of structures and ecosystems in order to be more responsive to health and development needs. It calls on the Arab countries to achieve these goals by 2030 through strategic initiatives, strengthening of the decision-making mechanism, the use of performance indicators, the guarantee of material and human resources, and research from regional cooperation, to improving water security and better monitoring it.