30 October 2013: The post-2015 development agenda should address inequalities to ensure access to water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH), according to a joint statement by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), Catarina de Albuquerque, the Special Rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation, and Friends of Water.
The agencies released the statement in coordination with a panel discussion on ‘Measuring inequalities in the Post-2015 development agenda: A new global tool for WASH for All and beyond’ organized by the Office of the Special Rapporteur and the Permanent Mission of Finland to the UN at UN Headquarters in New York, US.
the statement calls on UN Member States to frame the post-2015 agenda around the principles of equality and non-discrimination. In the statement, the groups commit themselves to “work to ensure that development priorities…focus on the millions of marginalized peoples who have remained hidden within aggregate statistics, and who continue to have no access to basic services.” It recommends goals, targets and indicators explicitly focus on disadvantaged and marginalized groups and individuals, including through utilizing disaggregated data, and proposes assessing success in relation to progress made in closing gaps or inequalities in access to WASH, as well as in sectors such as education and immunization.
The panel discussed integrating equality and non-discrimination into the post-2015 architecture, including as a stand-alone and cross-cutting Sustainable Development Goal (SDG); and introduced a tool to measure the elimination of inequalities, developed by the World Health Organization (WHO)-UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) for Water Supply and Sanitation. The tool disaggregates data into four groups: disadvantaged/marginalized groups and the general population; rich and poor; urban and rural; and slums and formal urban settlements. The tool assesses progress by: determining the necessary rate of progress for the better-off and worst-groups to meet each target; and establishing disparity by comparing the percentage of the worst-off population with access to the service with the percentage of the better-off population. A country is considered on track if the progress of the worst-off and better-off groups follows or exceeds the set rate of progress and disparities between the two groups narrow.
Speaking at the dialogue, Jan Eliasson, UN Deputy Secretary-General, noted that, despite gains in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), “the poorest 40% of the world’s people have seen minimal gains across many indicators related to water and sanitation” and inequalities continue to widen. To address inequality in the post-2015 agenda, including its gender dimensions, Eliasson recommended dismantling the multiple, systematic barriers that marginalize the most vulnerable populations, and welcomed the proposed tool as a “valuable contribution” in formulating a post-2015 agenda that addresses inequalities and discrimination. [UN Press Release] [Eliasson Statement] [Special Rapporteur Website] [IISD RS Sources]