The GMC joins End Water Poverty Campaign

July 2nd, 2010, Barcelona - The Global Movement for Children has joined the End Water Poverty Campaign this week to help strengthen the global coalition working to improve access to clean water and basic sanitation in the most empoverished parts of the world.

Sadly, children suffer heavily from this crisis. Out of the 21.000 children dying every day in the world from preventable causes, 4000 perish from preventable water related diseases, making it one of the biggest killers of young children. In total, a staggering 2.6 billion people live without a safe toilet and 884 million people lack access to clean water. These problems combine to make a massive crisis for developing countries - undermining health, education, economic and gender equality progress.

In the run-up to the UN MDG+10 Summit in September, one of the Global Movement for Children's main lines of action focuses on raising awareness and mobilising public opinion to further increase Government efforts to achieve the reduction of child mortality rates by two thirds by 2015, as set out in MDG4. Recent studies show that progress has been made in a number of the priority countries listed in the MDG agenda, however, to attain the target by the deadline of 2015, a redoubling of efforts is needed. Among these efforts, those related to improving water and sanitation systems accessible to all, as set out in MDG7, are key to improving achieving targets across the MDG board.

The End Water Poverty Campaign is a coalition that unites over 175 organisations worldwide to push Governments to take further action to halt this basic sanitation crisis. More specifically, the EWP campaign calls for:

• One global action plan for sanitation and water monitored by one global task force

• 70% of aid money for sanitation and water to be targeted at the poorest countries

• Water resources to be protected and shared equitably

As a global Movement that seeks to galvanize action around the protection of children's rights and more specifically within the MDG agenda, focuses on their basic right to health, the GMC endorses End Water Poverty's recommendations to achieve clean water and sanitation for all as laid out in its recently released “Breaking Barriers” policy briefing. To this end, it has also signed a joint letter addressed at UN Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon, calling for the above mentioned lines of action.