Women in the Philippines Demand a Solution: Lack of Clean Water and Sanitation Facilities Threatens Their Children and Their Lives
by Imelda V. Abaño
– Philippines –
For Edna Dela Cruz, water is life, but it’s also backbreaking work. As a young child, she trudged barefoot for hours in the hot sun over rough hilly terrain in search of water. Twenty-three years later and now a mother several times over, she still makes multiple trips daily to a deep well nearby.
In many developing countries, it’s a woman’s job to collect water for cooking, cleaning, drinking and sanitation. Women and girls walk an average six kilometers each day to fetch water. They carry around 20 kilograms – roughly the weight of a piece of travel luggage – on their heads.
“We walk long distances every day, sometimes slipping on rocks in the process, but we go on. The water isn’t good. It’s brackish. We don’t have clean water but we have no choice,” says Dela Cruz as she carries two water pails on her way back home.
For the millions of women like Dela Cruz, trying to provide clean water is a constant source of stress.
In search of adequate sanitation
According to a study released by the Asian Development Bank in early August the shocking reality is that some 2 billion people – roughly 66% of the population in Asia – lack access to adequate sanitation, such as toilets, pit latrines, septic tanks, and sewer systems. In fact, they represent nearly three-quarters of all people who live without such facilities.
In the Philippines, over 25 million Filipinos don’t have access to the basic sanitation afforded by toilet facilities; another 13 million don’t have proper water resources – without plumbing or communal water taps, many rely on creek water and deep wells which can often be unsafe for human consumption.
Dirty water costs Filipinos dearly: diseases like diarrhea, dysentery, cholera, typhus fever, typhoid, schistosomiasis (a blood disease which causes liver and intestinal damage from parasitic flatworms) and trachoma (the leading cause of preventable blindness in the world) all of which thrive in the absence of sanitation and clean water.
According to the latest World Bank Environment Monitor report on the Philippines, air and water pollution, along with poor sanitation and hygiene practices are the most significant environment-related health risks in the Philippines. Together, these factors account for an estimated 22 percent of reported disease cases and six percent of reported deaths, costing 14.3 billion PHP (approximately $287 million USD) per year in lost income and medical expenses.
“The good health of the Filipino people depends a lot on a healthy environment,” says Philippine Health Secretary Francisco Duque III. “The failure to ensure safe water supply and sanitation and the rapidity with which we degrade the environment through air and water pollutants greatly threatens human health and contributes to a high death toll across all ages. The poorest victims, however, are the children.”
Duque said that the Philippines somehow wants to fulfill the Millennium Development Goal target for water and sanitation which calls for reducing the proportion of the world population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation in half by 2015.
A sanitation emergency
Diarrhea has long been a major public health problem, one of the leading causes of illness among Filipinos. But now the Philippines Department of Health is putting a special urgency on prioritizing hygiene and sanitation programs because roughly 5.6 million Filipino households still do not have their own toilet facilities.
In Manila like many cities of the developing world, slum dwellers like 18-year-old Susan Casuga have to queue for hours to use poorly maintained communal or public toilets. She says she pays 10.00 PHP ($0.35 USD) every time she wants to use it.
“We suffer real embarrassment having to relieve ourselves in public. But we have no choice because we do not have our own toilet. So even if the [communal] toilet is broken or sewage is flowing everywhere, we have to stand it,” Casuga says.
The situation is even worse in the remote areas of the Philippines; especially in rural and upland areas, not only do most households not have their own toilets, but neither are communal or public toilets widely available. As a result, many dispose of their waste in open fields, creeks, rivers or grassy areas, posing serious health risks to everyone in the community.
United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) recently responded to the sanitation emergency in the Philippines by donating over 6,000 toilet bowls in early September for distribution to the remote villages of the Mountain Province in the Northern Philippines. Soon, some villagers won’t have to worry about managing and disposing their waste.
While the donation is a step towards solving this problem and improving sanitation in rural communities, actual implementation still poses a problem. The local governments and families who’ll receive the donations will have to construct the water-flushing toilets. Local municipalities will require that families without their own toilets first install a septic tank and have it approved before the plastic toilet bowl is given. Families who simply need repairs to their system will not be eligible. It is questionable as to whether those impoverished families who currently have no toilet of their own will be able to afford the septic tank necessary to receive the donated toilet bowl. While local governments are ready to subsidize water access for small villages they are still relying on villagers to fetch their own water and transport it to their homes through often difficult terrain to “flush” their toilets. Authorities anticipate that the project should be completed before the year ends.
Safe water and basic sanitation – a fundamental right
Improved water quality and basic sanitation are particularly important in helping to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, promote universal primary education, build gender equality, reduce child mortality, improve maternal health and ensure environmental sustainability.
Making clean water available to everyone will also help eliminate some of the water-related diseases responsible for so many millions of infant and maternal deaths, not only in the Philippines but across Asia. It will also leave many women more time to deal with other household chores instead of having to search for water, while allowing children enough time to play and do their homework.
For women, water is not just a commodity. Clean water is not only the key to life itself, but knowing it will be reliably available is a source of dignity for those whose job it is to provide it for their families.
About the Author
Imelda Visaya-Abaño, began her journalism career in 1998 as a reporter at the Philippine Daily Inquirer, the leading daily newspaper in the Philippines. Her areas of interest are women and children’s issues, science, environment, health, agriculture and education.
In 2002, Ms. Abaño was honored as the Asian Winner of the Global REUTERS-IUCN Media Awards on Environmental Reporting.
Ms. Abaño vows to continue serving her community through balanced news and fearless views. She believes in better journalism for better communities.
A very interesting article. Women really suffer the most in securing clean water and basic sanitation for the whole family. I have learned a lot from this article. You must be a very enterprising journalist . . . highly commendable! Keep up the good work!
Ramona
While painful to read, this article helps me to put things in perspective. As long as others are suffering from lack of water and basic sanitation, it is my responsibility to do what I can to contribute to a more just and equitable world.
Many thanks for this moving article. I wonder what will happen with the sanitation program and look forward to other articles as it unfolds. I also agree that water and sanitation are basic human rights.
One in six people around the world do not have access to clean water. Here in the US it is a very different story. While we do have safe and dependable drinking water, millions of us have turned to bottled water for its convenience, ignoring the carbon footprint to produce, package, and transport this “luxury” item (77% of which ends up in landfills despite the fact that the plastic is recyclable.) We were raised on tap water and when we were thirsty we bent over a public fountain and had a drink of water. Today this same water still runs free from our kitchen faucets. The roughly $16 billion dollars we will spend on bottled water in this country this year perhaps could be better spent in aid to those who do not have access to this essential resource.
Excellent idea, Kate!
I remember the days of drinking straight from the hose (which I still do when I’m gardening). To my young palate, the sweet, slightly metallic taste of the water was like nectar on a hot day. That taste, though deeply ingrained in my memory banks, has now come to signify something sinister in my adult mind – metals, chloride and the bleaching agents used for sanitation.
While my household chooses a Brita water filter over bottled water, it’s still paying into a system that in all reality for me, is unnecessary and just an added expense in my life. We do it in my household simply because it makes the water taste “cleaner”.
I think it’s really important to take stock of one’s own life in comparison to those who struggle to access the very same things – these things that we take for granted as always being available. I would gladly give up ever seeing bottled water in the US again if it meant providing clean water for another part of the world that now goes without.
Its really very painful to read that the people in Philippines do not get clean water as it really makes the person unhealthy and restless because health is most important, and to maintain your health, you need to be educated enough to do so.Water makes up more than two thirds of the weight of the human body, and without it, humans would die in a few days. Water is important to the mechanics of the human body. The body cannot work without it.Since water is such an important component to our physiology, it would make sense that the quality of the water should be just as important as the quantity. Drinking water should always be clean and free of contaminants to ensure proper health and wellness.
Its really very painful to read that the people in Philippines do not get clean water as it really makes the person unhealthy and restless because health is most important, and to maintain your health, you need to be educated enough to do so.Water makes up more than two thirds of the weight of the human body, and without it, humans would die in a few days. Water is important to the mechanics of the human body. The body cannot work without it.Since water is such an important component to our physiology, it would make sense that the quality of the water should be just as important as the quantity. Drinking water should always be clean and free of contaminants to ensure proper health and wellness.