Clean, safe water isn’t just a health issue – it’s about education too

Next week, Boris Johnson and Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta will co-host the Global Education Summit – an important opportunity to help shape education for children around the world.

There will rightly be an emphasis not just on education itself, but also on its wider benefits, from economic development to greater social equality.

I naturally applaud the ambition and I also recognise the scale of the challenges and potential impacts, having worked with colleagues in African and Asian universities for decades. The summit aims to achieve five-year pledges from the global community to help transform education systems in up to 90 countries and territories.

However, nothing puts the wider issues related to education in better context than a glass of safe drinking water – or the lack of one. For what I see through my work, as a professor of water policy at Oxford, is that in too many countries water is not just a massive health issue – it’s an education issue, too.

President Kenyatta knows this all too well. While progress in primary school enrolment has been made in Kenya, systemic challenges remain to not only getting children to school, but making sure they can thrive in a safe and productive environment.

Statistics from UNICEF and the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimate that only a quarter of schools in rural Kenya have drinking water for staff and children. In many cases, this water will be unsafe to drink, and often from multiple sources, including handpumps, rainwater tanks, open wells and rivers, with the reliability and availability of water varying by season and school.

Nor are the issues just about water for drinking. Data show four in five of these schools have nowhere for children to wash their hands. Thoughts quickly turn to issues of hygiene or of Covid-19, but there are other issues, too. Without water, many girls stay at home during their period, harming their education and damaging progress towards improving equality, health and job opportunities.

Such problems are not limited to Kenya either, and nor are they limited to the availability of water in schools themselves. Just recently, UNICEF and the WHO warned that the world is on course to miss United Nations sustainable development goal 6 – clean water and sanitation for all by 2030. They say that billions across the world will still lack access to safe water at that point unless the rate of progress quadruples – a situation they describe as “alarming”.

What makes this situation not just shocking but frustrating is that progress can be made. Indeed, Kenya provides an example of that, too, in the form of the FundiFix social enterprise, which I helped create with colleagues at Oxford, backed by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

FundiFix guarantees to keep water flowing in water points for communities, schools and clinics. Over 80,000 rural water users now pay an affordable monthly fee to ensure faults are fixed in less than three days, rather than a month or more, which is common across Africa. This has massive social benefits, particularly during the long dry periods, which are predicted to worsen with climate change.

We are yet to see the outcomes of the summit, though I would argue that there is an urgent need to include water as part of the education agenda. This point is particularly pressing given the impacts of climate change worldwide, with devastating floods and droughts hurting the most vulnerable disproportionately.

In light of this, governments worldwide need to focus on three key areas relating to water and education. First, they must take responsibility for delivering safe water services into schools. Second, to do this and ensure water access more broadly, there should be greater use of innovation and new funding models, with a focus on what works on the ground. FundiFix is just one example of what can be achieved.

And third, there is a need for exceptional political leadership to address this issue, globally and within countries – and while that is a requirement, we should all make clear it is also an opportunity.

Progress can be, and has been, made. However, as UNICEF and the WHO have made so clear, billions are set to still be without safe water and sanitation even in 2030.

Stressing that safe water for the world’s poor is an education issue, as well as a health issue, would help send a powerful signal at this critical time, and could help huge numbers of children, and adults, worldwide.

Rob Hope is professor of water policy at the University of Oxford