World Toilet Day, which the UN has held annually since 2013 every November 19, celebrates the importance of flush toilets and raises awareness of the 3.6 billion people who live without access to safely managed sanitation. In Venezuela, given the failures of the drinking water service, the exploitation of groundwater has been extended with official authorization
World Toilet Day aims to raise awareness in taking action to address the global sanitation crisis and achieve Sustainable Development Goal 6: Sanitation and water for all by 2030.
This year’s theme, titled «Make visible the invisible resource», focuses on the effects of the sanitation crisis on groundwater, as an inadequate sanitation system can risk spreading human excreta into rivers, lakes and soils, thus contaminating groundwater resources.
However, it seems that this problem is invisible. Invisible because it happens underground. Invisible because it happens in the poorest and most marginalized communities.
To put groundwater at risk is to put at risk the world’s most abundant freshwater source that supports drinking water supplies, sanitation systems, agriculture, industry and ecosystems.
As climate change worsens and populations grow, groundwater is vital to human survival.
In Venezuela, the number of drilling wells to extract underground water to bring the liquid to thirsty communities has increased significantly since 2020. This process has been a relief for the inhabitants of several municipalities in the country after the authorization of government entities. , has been used even by the government itself on top of the land where the emblematic Hotel Humboldt in Caracas is located.
Due to the increase in the use of this technique to provide water to the population, private companies have emerged that offer the service of drilling new wells, as well as recovery and maintenance of existing ones. which together with the old companies decided to form a guild. The activity is so intense that the authorities plan to standardize and regulate the business, which was strengthened due to the need of the people to solve the problems of public services that the government has not been able to improve.
Also read: Guild of water well drillers grows with 32 companies in the business (III)
In May 2022, Transparencia Venezuela published a report titled Wastewater: another environmental debt in Venezuela in which he denounces that “the lack of public policies and information on the management of these waters throughout the country hides severe environmental damage that can explode at any time and about which few care. Transparency Venezuela warns about this serious problem and joins its voice to that of academic experts and representatives of civil society organizations, to demand access to public information and urgent professional attention.
“Despite the fact that in 2018 the government of Nicolás Maduro created the first ministry in the country’s history dedicated exclusively to water management, the State has not published data on sewage treatment in Venezuelan territory. The most recent figure on water treatment is registered by the Venezuelan Chamber of Construction, in its National Infrastructure Plan 2021-2033, which indicates that only 28% of wastewater, urban and industrial, is treated in the country,” the report reads.
The central message of the UN in the World Toilet Day 2022 is that safely managed sanitation protects groundwater from contamination by human excreta.
This is a seemingly logical message but, currently, the world is a long way from fulfilling the promise of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6.2: ensuring safe toilets for all by 2030.
Data from the Inter-American Development Bank for 2020
The campaign urges governments to work an average of four times faster to ensure SDG 6.2 is achieved on time, while calling on politicians to fully recognize the connection between sanitation and groundwater in their plans to safeguard this vital water resource.
Also read: Sewage crisis in Venezuela: the drama of living among the pestilence
The key messages we must know for this World Toilet Day
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With information from the UN and the IDB.
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