Civil society SACOSAN review meeting, 9-11 November 2009
On 9-11 November, FAN South Asia held a civil society SACOSAN meeting of 70 grassroots organisations from all over South Asia along with WaterAid and the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC) to review the commitments made on sanitation by South Asian governments.
"The right to sanitation is imperative and yet governments are still failing to act with the urgency required," says Ramisetty Murali, FAN South Asia's Convenor. Strong political leadership is needed to address this devastating but preventable crisis.
A year after South Asian governments made the unprecedented commmitment to recognising access to both sanitation and drinking water as a basic right, diarrhoea continues to be the leading cause of child deaths in South Asia. Poor sanitation – alongside unsafe drinking water – causes 88 percent of these deaths.
Every two years, the same interval between SACOSAN meetings, one million children die from diarrhoea in South Asia. This is the true cost of poor progress on sanitation.
FANSA are calling on the governments of South Asia to urgently address the sanitation crisis by ensuring that every country has met the commitments set out in the Delhi Declaration.
Based on a number of national and sub-national consultations, CSO networks in India, Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh have mapped the progress of commitments made in Delhi Declaration, downloadable below. WaterAid will support FANSA to develop a traffic light paper tracking the commitments suitable for presentation which will be discussed in our Colombo meeting.
See pictures from the event on Twitpic
Download the official press release for the meeting
View or download any of the event's presentations