Toespraak van de Prins van Oranje, 15 augustus 2007

Toespraak | 15-08-2007

Excellencies, Ladies and gentlemen,

Once again it is a great pleasure to be amidst you.

Our Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation is pleased to see the International Year of Sanitation taking shape. Let me thank UN-Water and DESA for promoting and coordinating preparatory actions for IYS including co-hosting this session. Let me thank, above all, all the stakeholders and participants for your every effort to advance sanitation agenda during IYS and beyond.

By every statistical measure, we are far from where we ought to be to have a realistic hope of meeting the MDG target on sanitation - to halve the proportion of people lacking even basic sanitation services by 2015. Yet, I believe that if we are focused, committed, and smart about shaping the IYS agenda to create the right context for action, that target we have set for ourselves is within reach. Let me share some reasons why we must succeed.

Every fifteen seconds, a child somewhere in the world dies of diarrhea or another waterborne disease - that's two million children a year.

• Worldwide 2.6 billion people still have no safe place to go to the toilet.
• And at the current rate of progress we will not reach our 2015 target on sanitation before 2026. For Sub-Saharan countries it will take another hundred years, which means that an extra 133 million African children will die if nothing changes.

We all recognize that the lack of sanitation facilities imposes severe suffering on everyone, but most especially on women and girls. All of us understand that investing in sanitation will improve public health and that will drive economic growth. We all believe that extending sanitation facilities to the four out of ten people who currently do without, is essential to meeting all the Millennium Development Goals.

But what is lacking? Allow me to share with you three critical sentences taken from the report by the UN Millennium Project's Water and Sanitation Task Force:

"The absence of sanitation and hygiene from much of the discussion about water, health and development has found various explanations over the years.

What is clear is that excreta and its disposal have been and continue to be, unpopular subjects from the local to international levels.

Without strong champions to raise public awareness and generate concern, the sanitation crisis has not been met with anything resembling the kind of response necessary to make substantial and sustainable gains." (End of quote)

When the Advisory Board was drafting the Hashimoto Action Plan, we were well aware of the lack of progress on sanitation. We knew that we had to elevate sanitation to the highest levels of political discourse as a way to create more opportunity for action at the community level.

So the Advisory Board made the International Year of Sanitation a centerpiece of our Hashimoto Action Plan and we promoted the idea internationally. We believe that during the International Year of Sanitation strong champions will find their voices. They will make the public aware of how the sanitation crisis creates human suffering, erodes dignity, and degrades the environment. And that public awareness and public concern will force leaders to respond.

We were delighted when member states rallied behind this proposal which culminated in the General Assembly adopting the resolution in December 2006. Since that time, the positive response and commitment to coordinated action by organizations working in this field has been most gratifying. At our May meeting in New York, participants representing a wide range of stakeholders agreed to a set of eight broad objectives for the IYS. At our Board's most recent meeting in June in Shanghai, we endorsed those objectives. We have now shared them with Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. He has already pledged his full support to the IYS, and we can count on Mr. Ban next year.

These IYS objectives are available here and they cover a wide range of issues. For example, the critical need to mobilize communities and to tailor sanitation services to local needs. Government commitment to really tackling sanitation is central along with developing and strengthening institutional and human capacity by recognizing that progress in sanitation coverage requires interlinked programmes in hygiene, household and school facilities, and in collecting, treating, and safely reusing or disposing of wastewater and human excreta.

Investing in sanitation is about giving people health, dignity and development. It leads to lower child mortality, better maternal health, fewer deaths from waterborne diseases, fewer girls dropping out of school and more women playing an active role in their communities. I repeat today what I have been saying for the past several months: every dollar spent on sanitation is a dollar spent on at least five other MDGs.

Today we have only a few hours. Our hope is that when we are finished we will have made significant progress by agreeing on an Action Plan based on a shared understanding of prioritized activities. This Action Plan should build on our IYS Objectives. Our Action Plan will not be a linear road, but a series of lanes, highly textured with ideas, actions, and inputs from around the world. It is critical that we reach as many groups as possible through the IYS. This is a challenging task, and we ask all of you to collaborate with us to find the synergies and shared opportunities among our organizations and individuals.

UNSGAB has established a Working Group on Sanitation chaired by Ms. Margaret Catley-Carlson and we have discussed how we can best support the International Year of Sanitation.

We are poised to support your efforts and work with you over the coming months.

I look forward to this concrete step to put sanitation back on track towards achievement of Millennium Development Goals.

Thank you.