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Some 500 children die every day from lack of safe water and sanitation in sub-Saharan Africa, the UN Chidlren's Fund (UNICEF) said on Tuesday.
"With a population which has nearly doubled in the last 25 years in the region, access to sanitation only increased by six percent and to water by 20 percent in the same period, leaving millions behind," Farhan Haq, the deputy UN spokesman, told reporters here.
"The lowest access rates to improved drinking water are in Equatorial Guinea, Chad and the Democratic Republic of the Congo," Haq said at a daily news briefing here.
Haq made the statement as the West and Central Africa conference on financing for water and sanitation opened Tuesday in Dakar, the capital of Senegal.
"With children dying every single day, with millions stunted, with such a huge economic toll, it cannot be business as usual," said the UNICEF regional director for West & Central Africa, Manuel Fontaine.
"The pace of progress has to speed up exponentially -- and it's going to take strong policies; robust financing; and a major shift in priorities among those who have the power to act."
Currently, nearly half of the global population without access to improved drinking water lives in sub-Saharan Africa and some 700 million people in the region lack access to improved sanitation.
UNICEF said that without speedy action, the situation can drastically worsen within the next 20 years, as rapidly rising populations outstrip the efforts of governments to provide essential services.
The first West and Central Africa Innovative Financing for Water Sanitation & Hygiene conference is being convened by UNICEF in cooperation with the government of Senegal and the African Ministers' Council on Water.
UNICEF has invited 24 governments in the sub-region to meet with major investment banks, international organizations, businesses and experts. The aim is to find new mechanisms to raise the estimated 20-30 billion U.S. dollars annually the relevant sector will need to bring universal access to water and sanitation to West and Central Africa.
UN estimates are that global economic losses due to inadequate water, sanitation and hygiene amount to 260 billion U.S. dollars per year. As the sub-region with the worst access, West and Central Africa carries a significant portion of this burden.
No country in West and Central Africa has universal access to improved drinking water. According to the UNICEF/World Health Organization (WHO) Joint Monitoring Programme Report 2015, the highest coverage rates are in Sao Tome & Principe (97 percent), Gabon (93 percent) and Cabo Verde (92 percent).
At the other end of the spectrum there are countries where roughly half the population do not have access, with the lowest rates in Equatorial Guinea (48 percent), Chad (51 percent) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (52 percent).
Access to sanitation is even more challenging. In the countries with the best coverage, as many as one in four persons still lack adequate sanitation. Equatorial Guinea (75 percent), Cabo Verde (72 percent), and Gambia (59 percent) are the top three in terms of access. The lowest coverage is in Niger (11 percent), Togo (12 percent), and Chad (12 percent).
However, funding for the water and sanitation sector is uneven and insufficient. No African country has allocated more than 0.5 percent of GDP to water and sanitation. Meanwhile, of the 3.8 billion U.S. dollars of Overseas Development Aid (ODA) allocated for water and sanitation in 2012, approximately three-quarters went to water, and the remaining quarter to sanitation.
Most ODA funding goes to countries which are already doing well, and while rural water and sanitation access is far behind urban, both external and domestic funding goes primarily to urban systems.
"While we know what needs to be done, we have to figure out a way to do it faster and better," said Fontaine. "There are a lot of options on the table; what is not an option is to continue to allow children to pay for our lack of action."
