UN celebrates World Water Day (22 March) on 20 March

On 20 March the Organization is celebrating World Water Day (22 March), with the main UN event being held in Geneva. Click here for programme details. In New York, UNDP and UNICEF (UN Water) are organizing an event on sanitation at Columbus Circle and staff are invited to participate on their lunch break.

A UN Water-sponsored exhibition called ‘Sanitation is Dignity’ will take place at New York's Central Park West, Merchants Gate (by Columbus Circle, south-west entrance) between 12.00 – 2.00pm. Also, New Yorkers are called on to show up and line up for going to a portaloo (portable bathroom), so as to raise public awareness on why the restroom is the most important room of all and why too many people suffer in silence without one.

An estimated 1.5 million children around the world die unnecessarily from diarrhea every year because they don’t have access to a toilet or clean water. That means that every 20 seconds, a child dies from diseases associated with a lack of sanitation and clean water.  In total, 2.6 billion people around the world don’t have the luxury of a toilet to line up to. The United Nations has launched 2008 as the 'International Year of Sanitation’ to accelerate the progress for these people.

Helping them would do more than reduce the death toll; it would serve to protect the environment, alleviate poverty and promote development, states the Secretary-General. Water issues underpin much of the Organization’s work in the areas where sanitation is a problem. A number of health and development challenges, like malaria or TB, rising food prices and environmental degradation often turn out to have water as the common denominator. The MDGs set a target of cutting the number of people without safe access to water in half by 2015, and the SG maintains that reaching it is critically important.

Not having access to sanitation means that people are forced to draw water for drinking, cooking and washing from rivers, lakes, ditches and drains that are polluted with human and animal excrement. There is powerful evidence to show how access to sanitation benefits people’s well-being. Research shows that in Peru, for example, installing a flush toilet in the home increases a Peruvian child’s chances of surviving to her first birthday by almost 60 percent.