Water scarcity affects emotions, study says.

Water shortages are linked to emotional distress among people living in poor urban areas, according to a study an ASU researcher collaborated on.

Amber Wutich, an assistant professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change, and Kathleen Ragsdale, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work at Mississippi State University, conducted the study that examined the extent to which water-related emotional distress is linked with water insecurity. Unequal distribution of water between rich and poor people was a major factor.

In their paper titled “Water insecurity and emotional distress: Coping with supply, access and seasonal variability of water in a Bolivian squatter settlement,” published in a 2008 edition of Social Science and Medicine, the pair observed different aspects of water insecurity.

Wutich said the study examined three dimensions of water insecurity: inadequate water supply, insufficient access to water and dependence on seasonal water sources.

“Recent research suggests that insecure access to key resources is associated with negative mental health outcomes,” Wutich said. “Many of these studies focus on drought and famine in agricultural, pastoral and foraging communities.”

Wutich said her study is the first to systematically examine community patterns of water insecurity in an urban setting.

The study was conducted in 2004 and 2005 through face-to-face survey interviews with a random sample of 72 household heads in Villa Israel, a squatter settlement of Cochabamba, Bolivia. Participants were asked how they felt emotionally about the water situation and were given four options: fear, worry, anger and bother.

Interviews were conducted four times over an eight-month period to capture variation in experiences at the height of Bolivia’s wet and dry seasons, Wutich said.

At the conclusion of the research, she said, only one of the four tested variables was proven to cause emotional distress.

“We found that only inequities in the distribution of water was significantly related to emotional distress,” Wutich said.

Wutich explained that in a market system of water distribution, water is not equally dispersed amongst the community, causing many poor residents to face water shortages.

According to the World Health Organization’s Web site, 1.1 billion people throughout the world lack adequate water provisions, and 2.2 million people die as a result of water-related illnesses each year.
In their paper, Wutich and Ragsdale quote some of the people they met in Bolivia in relationship to their water shortage.

“What I dislike about living here is that there is no water, the streets are dirty and there is no sewer, all of this is very uncomfortable,’” said one Bolivian woman. “‘With more water, I could clean my house, wash the bathroom.’”

The study concluded her emotional distress was common among the urban poor.

“These results suggest that water-related emotional distress develops as a byproduct of the social and economic negotiations people employ to gain access to water distribution systems in the absence of clear procedures or established water rights, rather than as a result of water scarcity per se,” Wutich said.

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bangladeshPollution at Kaptai Lake is taking a serious turn due to open defecation by the slum dwellers and unabated dumping of garbage and wastes everyday, causing waterborne diseases like diarrhoea, dysentery and jaundice.

The people in Rangamati and Kaptai may face disasters if water pollution and crisis of safe drinking water continue. It also may cause environmental disaster any time, environmentalists said.

Dumping of wastes, open defecation by the slum dwellers and the passengers of water transports are the prime causes of pollution at Kaptai Lake, sources said.

They said several lakh people living in the lake areas in Rangamati and Kaptai are facing the problem as they use water of the lake in daily household and other purposes. Many of the families, including indigenous people, used to drink lake water directly.

Rangamati unit of National NGO Forum, working on safe water and sanitation in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), also found very alarming result during its survey and test on lake water.

Its officials have collected water from the most polluted areas of the lake. Total Coli Form (TCF) and Facile Form (RCF) were 800 and 300 respectively in per 100 millilitres in the Rajbari area, 500 TCF and 350 FCF at Banarupa while 600 TCF and 450 FCF in the Reserve Bazar area, according to the test. TCF and FCF level should be zero in water, said Alak Bikash Dewan, an official of the NGO Forum.

Md Anwar Hossain, environmentalist and secretary of Rangamati Environment Conservation and Development Organisation (RECDO), said immediate step is needed to save the lake from pollution. Otherwise, it may cause disastrous situation in future.

He said due to the pollution, waterborne diseases are spreading fast as many depend on the lake water for their bathing and drinking.

Following this, number of patients with waterborne diseases at the Rangamati General Hospital was also increasing, district Civil Surgeon (CS) office sources said.

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FERTILITY CHANGES IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA. DHS COMPARATIVE REPORTS 18, 2008. (pdf, fulltext)

This MEASURE/DHS report provides an overview of major fertility trends in sub-Saharan Africa in the second half of the 20th century. It also presents the proximate determinants (factors that have a direct mechanical effect on fertility levels) and the socioeconomic correlates of these trends. The dynamics of the fertility decline were different in urban and rural areas. On average for the countries investigated, the trends in urban and rural areas started to split in approximately 1960.

The date of onset of the fertility decline varied greatly by region and country, ranging from the early 1960s in the first urban areas to the late 1990s in the last rural areas. A few rural communities had not started the transition at the time covered by the last available survey. The speed of the fertility decline, approximately 1 child per decade, also varied markedly among countries, from 1.5 children per decade to less than 0.5 children per decade. In addition, a stall in fertility decline occurred in six of the countries investigated (Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar [urban areas], Nigeria, Rwanda-rural, Tanzania [rural areas]); in five of these countries, this stall occurred in 1995-2005.

The pattern of the fertility decline in sub-Saharan Africa did not appear to be very different from that of many other countries in the world. However, the fertility decline in sub-Saharan Africa seems to have been somewhat more influenced by changing nuptiality patterns than elsewhere, and its relationship with socioeconomic correlates was somewhat less influenced by income levels and trends than other countries.

New Delhi: India’s rural development ministry, which has to build 78 toilets a minute to meet its sanitation goal under the UN Millennium Development Goals, or MDG, by 2012, is confident of meeting the target.

An official in the ministry of rural development, who asked not to be named because he is not authorized to speak to the media, said: “We expect the new target (100% sanitation access in rural areas by 2012) to be achieved.”

Only by building 112,300 toilets every day can India ensure access to toilets for every household, the ministry’s website said.

According to Ishaprasad Bhagwat, director, programme operations, WaterAid India, the local arm of an international organization that works in the area of drinking water and sanitation, while India would “most definitely” achieve the target, it would do so “by 2015” and not “2012 as has been announced by the government of India”.

One of the government’s flagship programmes, the Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) aims to eradicate open defecation by 2010.

According to the ministry of health and family welfare, poor sanitation and diseases caused by this result in an annual loss of 180 million man-days and an economic loss of Rs1,200 crore in India. According to a Unicef/WHO (United Nations Children’s Fund/World Health Organization) joint study on the country’s progress on sanitation goals, India has a little more than half the 1.2 billion people worldwide who defecate in the open.

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SANA’A, Nov. 9 — A seminar on the hazards of using sewage water to irrigate crops was held on Thursday in Taiz during the Al-Saeed Forum for Sciences and Culture.

Chaired by Professor Abdulrahman Al-Zubairi, chairman of the department of Microbiology in the Faculty of Sciences at Taiz University, the seminar stressed the importance of immediate attention to the fact that a shortage of water resources has prompted many Yemeni farmers to resort to use sewage water to irrigate their farms.

Al-Zubairi explains, “The shortage of water is the result of both the increasing rate of population growth and irresponsible irrigation. Only seven percent of underground water is consumed by the population, while 93 percent is used for irrigating crops, especially qat.”

The total amount of water used annually is 3.5 billion cubic meters of which 93 percent is used in agriculture, 6 percent in households and 1 percent by industry. According to the Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation, the renewed fresh water is 2.5 billion cubic meters per year creating a gap between used water and renewed fresh water of one billion cubic meters a year.

Topography experts at the ministry predict that because of population growth 4.6 billion cubic meters of water will be needed by 2025.

The Ministry of International Planning and Cooperation has built many stations for filtering water in Aden, Hajah, Emran and Yarim. Funded by the German Constructor Bank, the stations enable farmers in these governorates to reuse sewage water for irrigation.

However, researchers at Taiz University have found that health hazards still exist. Because these filters are only capable of removing solid waste from sewage water, parasites and bacteria remain in the water, according to Al-Zubairi

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Better policy, better health

THE new health policy update (August 2008) has given rise to some heated debates as to the universal right to Primary Health Care (PHC) and the open market approach through “non-state institutions” like the NGOs and the private sector operators. Real case studies of the national health care models and simulated projections can help visualise a probable model.

The urban primary healthcare system in Bangladesh is a good proxy for this exercise because it is defined and information is available. We can easily study the two most significant entities — the government and the NGO.

The government system – In Bangladesh, the publicly financed primary health facility in urban areas is quite poor. There are just 9095 Mother and Child Welfare Centers (MCWC) and 3540 urban dispensaries focusing entirely on primary care. By contrast, rural areas have almost 6,000 primary health care service delivery points.

The NGO system – The urban vacuum in non-commercial primary health care is mostly filled by NGO clinics. Approximately 19% of the total population receives services through an NGO clinic. Currently, two major networks funded by ADB and USAID provide comprehensive PHC (Essential Service Package/ESP) in the urban areas.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has supported NGO service delivery for the past 30 years. The USAID network has evolved from separate rural and urban mechanisms in the first phase (1997-2002) to a unified program in the second phase (2002-2008), and now the Smiling Sun Franchising Program (SSFP: 2008-2011) aims to establishing a franchising network of NGO clinics.

“Franchising itself is a new concept and approach in Bangladesh. It is a system where individuals or businesses (franchisees) invest their assets in a system to utilise the brand name, operating system and ongoing support. Everyone (franchisee) in the system is licensed to use the brand name and operating system. The business relationship is a joint commitment by all franchisees and the franchisor, to get and keep customers. Legally, franchisees are bound use the prescribed marketing and operating systems of the franchisor.”

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New Delhi, Nov 10 (PTI) The government has approved the National Urban Sanitation Policy which aims to make sanitation facilities universally available in urban areas.
The policy specially focuses on hygienic and affordable sanitation facilities for the urban poor and women and will ensure improved cleanliness in cities and towns, said a senior Urban Development Ministry official.

The goals include awareness generation and behavioural change, elimination of open defecation, integrated city-wide sanitation, safe disposal and proper operation and maintenance of all sanitary installations.

According to 2001 census, more than 12 million urban households do not have access to latrines and defecate in the open and 12.47 million urban households do not have access to drainage network, leading to a major environmental and public health hazard in the country.

Government will help formulating and implementing a strategy on capacity building and training to support states to build their personnel capacities and organisational systems for delivery of sanitation services, said the official.

Press Trust of India

Rapid urbanisation in developing nations threatens to trigger a water and sanitation crisis in quickly expanding slums, a report has warned.

Charity WaterAid said chronic water shortages in many of the world’s slums were being exacerbated by the arrival of millions of people each week.

Populations in developing nations are set to triple over the next 30 years.

The authors called on the international community to take urgent action to tackle the problem.

“Sanitation and water are integral to urban development and yet there is no coherent commitment by governments and donors to address this crisis,” said Timeyin Uwejamomere, the report’s author.

“It needs to be given the highest priority and recognition that water and sanitation brings massive health, education and economic benefits.”

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Theme: Harmonious Urbanization: The Challenge of Balanced Territorial Development

Fourth session of the World Urban Forum, 03 – 06 November 2008, Nanjing, China.
The World Urban Forum was established by the United Nations to examine one of the most pressing issues facing the world today: rapid urbanization and its impact on communities, cities, economies and policies. It is projected that in the next fifty years, two-thirds of humanity will be living in towns and cities.

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“New evidence released by APHRC reveals the main health conditions accounting for illnesses and deaths among people living in urban informal settlements in Kenya. Among children below five years, the main causes of death are pneumonia, diarrhea and stillbirths, which account for 60% of all deaths.”

This brief focuses on the burden of disease among people living in informal settlements of Nairobi, Kenya. Its purpose is to highlight the major diseases accounting for deaths in the slum communities, and the need for governments and development partners to prioritize efforts
to address them. Information on burden of disease is crucial for planning. This has been attested to in Tanzania where a burden of disease approach for district and national planning has been successfully used to reduce child deaths.

Read More – APHRC Policy Brief, 2008 (pdf)