Toespraak van de Prins van Oranje tijdens de 16e UNSGAB te New York

Toespraak | 21-06-2011

Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, Friends,

It is a pleasure to be here in my role as Chair of the Secretary-General's Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation. Our Board members offer a diverse set of skills in areas like finance, monitoring, integrated water resources management and water and disaster. We all draw on our different expertise and background in the work with development banks, governments, regional bodies and the United Nations to help expand provision of safe drinking water and basic sanitation.

I'd really like to thank all of you for being here to learn more about sanitation. Sanitation is arguably the most overlooked and less advanced Millennium Development Goal target. It is unglamorous, yet vital. Neglecting the need for proper toilets allows a slow moving crisis to continue. This crisis unfolds each and every day for the 2.6 billion people who simply don't have a clean, safe, hygienic place to defecate. Our Board shares the belief that basic sanitation is fundamental for human dignity and is essential for economic and social development. After your brief time with us today, I hope that you too will share in this belief and will join our efforts to make the Millennium Development Goal target for basic sanitation an urgent priority.

In 2008 the UN mandated International Year of Sanitation was launched. It was a much needed platform for greater awareness, advocacy, and action for sanitation. When we took stock of the International Year's impact, we heard time and time again that having one of the most respected and esteemed institutions in the world - the United Nations - recognize sanitation's importance opened a deeply needed space for dialogue. For example, during 2008 many politicians talked publicly about sanitation for the first time, the media paid attention to the urgent need for toilets and hand-washing, more communities organized to build and maintain latrines, and governments were inspired to organize and assign responsibility to roll out sanitation services. By all accounts the International Year succeeded because of the hard work of many dedicated advocates. But as we all know, a year goes by very quickly. The sanitation crisis, however, is a long-term problem solvable only with sustained action. So our Board encouraged Member States to endorse the Sustainable Sanitation: five-year drive to 2015 as an advocacy platform to maintain and build on the momentum generated during the International Year right through to 2015. I would like to thank Member States for adopting the resolution calling for the Drive to 2015 last December. It includes wording never seen in a UN resolution before as it calls for an end to open defecation. This is an encouraging sign that we are breaking down the sanitation taboo which is both necessary and urgent.

Now the hard work begins!

Ladies and Gentlemen:

Access to sanitation has now been recognized by the United Nations as a human right, a basic service required to live a normal life. But moral arguments-no matter how compelling-are not enough. We must also show how the lack of sanitation undermines health, retards economic and social development and degrades the environment. In the last several years, the sanitation community has gathered empirical evidence showing the harmful impacts caused when human excreta is not properly contained and treated. Much of this evidence is reflected in Drive to 2015 fact sheets which articulate the new evidence base and also demonstrate sanitation's contribution to development in language accessible to the general public. These five fact sheets represent the Drive to 2015's main messages that sanitation is vital for good health, it brings dignity, equality and safety, it is good economic investment and sanitation sustains clean environments. And above all that we need to make the right to sanitation a reality.

I encourage you to read and share these fact sheets and to find them on our new website which is going live today. You can also check us out on Twitter and Facebook - sanitation is fully on-line!

Ladies and Gentlemen:

It is my sincere pleasure to introduce the Secretary-General who has been a strong supporter of sanitation issues in the past, and who I know will be a central figure in the Sustainable Sanitation: five-year drive to 2015.