Keeping children alive

Water, sanitation and hygiene

Progress and challenges

Water and sanitation are essential for life, for health, for dignity and for empowerment
and prosperity. They are human rights, fundamental to every child and adult. But in
Uganda, poor sanitation and hygiene, as well as unequal access to safe drinking water,
make thousands of children very sick and at risk of death.
Diarrhoea alone, one of three major childhood killers in Uganda, kills 33 children
every day.
In most cases children get the disease by drinking unsafe water or from contact with
contaminated hands – theirs or their parents/caregivers – that have not been washed
with soap.
Early childhood diarrhoea is not only deadly, it also contributes to Uganda’s
high levels of stunting, which in turn affects children’s cognitive development and
performance at school.
By the same token, lack of proper sanitation facilities in schools leads to high
absenteeism and drop-out of children from school, especially girls.
Access to improved water and sanitation facilities does not, on its own, necessarily
lead to improved health. There is now very clear evidence showing the importance
of hygienic behaviour, in particular hand washing with soap at critical times: after
defecating and before eating or preparing food.
Another key strategy to reduce childhood illness and death is to stop the use of
open fields or the bush as a toilet. In Uganda, close to a tenth of the population
practises open defecation and two thirds of households do not wash hands with soap.
It is poor people who carry the burden of poor sanitation. The poorest 20 per cent of
the population is 13.5 times more likely to defecate in the open than the wealthiest 20
per cent.1
The key to increasing the practice of hand washing with soap and ending open
defecation is to promote behavioural change through motivation, information and
education. Likewise, there needs to be clean water readily available for people to be
© UNICEF/UN03331/Ose

able to improve their hygiene habits. And girls must have privacy and dignity when
using sanitation facilities.

1 World Bank, Economic Impacts of Poor Sanitation in Africa, Water and Sanitation Program (WSP), 2012.

Many children are deprived of

Access to sanitation is low
clean water

3 out of 10
Ugandan households do not have a latrine

33% 60% 8%
of mothers with children under 5 have soap and
of children of children live 30
water readily available for hand washing
do not have minutes walking
access to distance from a
safe water water source
10%
of Ugandans practise open defecation

Source: UNICEF, Situation Analysis of Children in Uganda, 2015.

 Keeping children alive

Water, sanitation and hygiene

“
Key interventions

In the new country programme 2016–2020, UNICEF will support: People are healthy
• Scale-up of community-led total sanitation (CLTS). and happy, no
• Water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) in schools and health facilities. more diarrhoea,
• District and community capacity development for WASH (rural/underserved areas), especially among
including monitoring and reporting. children…
• Public/private partnerships for innovative sanitation technologies and maintenance our children’s
of WASH facilities. academic
• Strengthening of capacity for emergencies, including cholera preparedness and performance is
response. improving since
• Evidence-based advocacy to leverage resources for rural WASH, including scale-up they spend more
of WASH. time in school.
Expected results

• If the target of 90 per cent access to safe drinking water is achieved by 2020, 8.3
million Ugandans, including children, will be protected from water-borne diseases
such as diarrhoea.
”
Jerest Opio, mother of two who
saw the benefits of not drinking
contaminated water from Lake Albert
following an awareness campaign in
Kayonga
• If the target to reduce the rate of open defecation to 5 per cent is met by 2020,
200,000 people will stop practising one of the most unhealthy hygiene habits.
• If the target of 50 per cent of households with hand washing facilities is reached by
2020, 6.6 million people will be able to better practise handwashing with soap.
© UNICEF/UNI183446/Wandera

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