Ghana Business News reports, “Nomathemba Niseni, a human rights commissioner in Zimbabwe, has asked participants (from over 70 countries) at a Global Forum on Sanitation and Hygiene in Mumbai, India, to desist from using terminologies which suggest the poor and needy do not know what is wrong with them or what they need (in relation to water and sanitation).”
Niseni’s talk was titled, ‘The Human Rights to Water and Sanitation: What difference if any, does the human right to sanitation make for poor people’.
She said, “You can hold your governments for the Convention of the Rights of the Child, which states that the child must be given water and sanitation. …Once we adopt the UN rights-based approach to programming, it will do a lot more for the poor. So I recommend that as we leave this forum, we start with words like right holders and duty bearers.”
The article adds, “Differentiating between charity and rights, Niseni told the gathering to insist on using terms such as right holders for the poor, who may not be as privileged as they were and hold accountable the duty bearers (government), by checking the Acts and Conventions they have signed and agreed to.”
The Council of Canadians/ Blue Planet Project is currently in the process of hiring two organizers – in South Africa and India – to advance the recognition and implementation of the rights of water and sanitation internationally. We also have a Mexico City-based organizer – Claudia Campero Arena – to do this work in Latin America. Her blogs can be read at http://canadians.org/blog/?author=15.
