No water, no school

Eleven-year-old Mwajuma Ngaina collects water for her family from this hole in the ground. This is a task that millions of children around the world undertake every day, using up valuable time and energy.

Credit: WaterAid / Alex Macro

Imagine not being able to go to school because there is no water. It sounds like a Monday morning wish come true! But the lack of water forces millions of children across the developing world to miss out on their education, as David Redhouse reports.

In the UK it's likely to be too much water which takes young people out of their classrooms - the 2000 floods forced temporary school closures across the Midlands. But in Africa or Asia it is likely to be too little water.

The need to walk to distant water sources, to queue for inadequate supplies, or sickness from water related illnesses, means that many pupils miss out on some, or even all, of their education.

In the UK the unexpected time off school may provide an enjoyable extra short holiday. But in developing countries the impacts can be long-term and damaging. The 104 million children who are presently not in school are destined to join the 860 million adults around the world who are illiterate.

And just as in the UK people with low basic skills are ineligible for 96% of jobs, the economic opportunities for people in developing countries who missed out on education are also much lower.

Oxfam¹ have reported that in Vietnam two-thirds of households headed by someone with no education live below the poverty line whereas only half of households headed by someone with primary education do so, and for households with secondary education the figure lowers to 41%.

Further research has found that every additional year of education raises a farmer's agricultural output by 2%. In Brazil and Mexico workers with primary education earn twice as much as those without, while Bangladeshi women educated to secondary level earn seven times more than their uneducated contemporaries.

And even more disturbingly, these economic inequalities then reproduce themselves through education or, more accurately, the lack of it. Poor children are less likely to go to school in the first place and more likely to drop out if they do so. The richest fifth of Indian households have universal primary education while the poorest fifth do not get even one half of their children past the first year of education.

Children in Nefadji village school in Mali study health education as part of the new water supply project. Before the project many could not attend school.

Credit: WaterAid / Daniel O'Leary

This overall picture looks even worse when viewed from a gender perspective. In a cruel double whammy girls are less likely to get an education even though the benefits of educating girls are greater than educating boys. Some 57% of the 104 million children out of school are girls. UNESCO's analysis of 11 countries including seven in Sub-Saharan Africa found that girls have 20% less chance of starting school than boys. But increasing female literacy has twice as much impact in cutting child mortality as does the same increase in male literacy.

In short, women use their education for the benefit of their whole family. For every extra year of maternal education, child mortality rates reduce by 8%, in part, for example, because illiterate mothers are only half as likely to have their children vaccinated.

The world's poorest 1.3 billion people living on less than $1 a day are therefore generally also the world's most poorly educated. And if that population number sounds familiar it may well be because it is not far from the 1.1 billion people estimated to lack access to safe water.

Just as the links between education and poverty are strong, there is a close correlation between water and sanitation and education. Project evaluations and research has found:

• A 15% increase in Bangladeshi school attendance when water hauling time is reduced

• A 12% increase in Tanzanian school attendance when water is available within 15 minutes instead of being more than an hour away

• 11% more girls attend school when there are sanitation facilities available offering proper privacy

Understanding this interplay between water, sanitation, education and poverty is crucial if we are to tackle poverty in a sustainable way.

Developing country governments are increasingly writing Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) as the guiding framework for national spending programmes. WaterAid's own research has found that these plans too often fail to understand how water underpins so many aspects of poverty.

WaterAid's country programmes are therefore working with governments to increase understanding of these causal relationships. For example in Madagascar, the government has recently amended its PRSP to prioritise sanitation after it became clear that the costs - including 3.5 million schooldays lost each year to ill-health related to bad sanitation - of ignoring the problem were much greater than the costs of dealing with it.

In a neat circle therefore, educating government decision-makers about the importance of water and sanitation leads to greater provision of these services. And with more of these essential services children have both the time and the good health to get the education which can lead them out of poverty.

David Redhouse is WaterAid's Policy Officer, Financing the sector.

Footnote

¹The Oxfam Education Report, Watkins K Oxfam 2000.

Other sources of information used in this article:

• BBC Nottingham 10 November 2000

• Statistics from Gender and Education for All: The Leap to Equality UNESCO 2000

• "Progress Report and Critical Next Steps in Scaling Up" (World Bank/IMF Development Committee March 27, 2003

• "Water and Sanitation in Tanzania" Ministry Of Water And Livestock Development et al 2003

• DFID Strategy Paper "Education for All: The Challenge of Universal Primary Education" 2000

• Assainissement: Le Defi WaterAid Madagascar et al 2003