Q: What does a ‘Global Framework for Action’ actually mean in practice?
A: It means these four things:
• An Annual Review of the sector – looking at how money is invested in water and sanitation by both developed and developing countries, what’s worked well and what hasn’t, where progress is being made and where it isn’t, and where more cash is needed.
• An Annual High Level Meeting – where the right people to make change will all be in the same room, looking at the Annual Review and making commitments to sort out any problems
• Investment from developing country governments – country leaders have to prioritise investment in their own nations as well as developing national, coordinated plans that will deliver and monitor sanitation and water services.
• A commitment that no credible national water and sanitation plan should fail for lack of money – donor governments should make a promise that if realistic plans are agreed by developing countries there will be money available to ensure their success.
Q: So what you’re asking for is a bunch of meetings and paperwork! Won’t this just mean more bureaucracy and less action?
A: The problem at the moment is that there is no coordinated effort or enough political will and money to tackle sanitation and water worldwide (unlike other areas such as HIV or education). We are asking for a ‘global framework for action’. That means an agreed way of working together to ensure good sanitation and access to clean water for everyone. Having meetings doesn’t guarantee action, but if the right people are present they can be an important step in agreeing on a coordinated way to take action and holding people accountable to make sure it is taken! If there isn’t a framework for action then different countries may try and tackle sanitation and water in haphazard and uncoordinated ways and the problem won’t get sorted. Also, without a framework for action, countries can make nice-sounding promises, but there isn’t any way to make sure that promises get turned into action. A framework for action might sound boring – and in some ways it is – but it is the vital first step that happens before all the exciting stuff – the good toilets and clean, accessible water sources – gets done. In order to get this framework for action all the key people need to get together on a regular basis to come up with it, and then make sure it’s being implemented properly.
Q: Doesn’t Tearfund say that the local church is the answer to problems like dirty water and poor sanitation?
A: The local church has a vital role to play in communities all around the world. Tearfund’s church partners are working with local communities to help provide clean water and pit latrines from Burundi to Brazil and Cambodia to Congo. But the scale of the problem – nearly forty per cent of the world without a decent toilet and 900 million people without access to clean water – is more than even the local church can tackle. Everyone needs to work together; governments, churches, mosques, community groups. But it’s governments who ultimately are responsible for ensuring people have access to basic services like water and sanitation, and who can free up the big money – the kind of amounts needed to make this happen - and it’s governments who can coordinate plans and agree targets for progress across the board. That’s why Tearfund’s global network of local churches – churches in the UK and around the world - are calling on governments to act, as well as coordinating resources to practically serve their local communities in the name of Jesus.
Q: Surely I can’t really make any difference – how can one person change a worldwide problem?
A: Well you’d be surprised what one person can do with a whole load of tenacity and a bucket-load of faith. But we’re not asking anyone to go it alone here. This is about precisely the opposite; it’s about coordinating our voices so that people in power hear the voices of people in poverty with our voices joining them, turning the whisper of an individual into the roar of the global church. That’s why Tearfund has people working on coordinating campaigns. When we speak on something at the same time and at an opportune moment, we can get things changed in a way that would be almost impossible if we spoke as individuals in an uncoordinated way. Depending on when you’re using Turn it up, the campaign (called Make Life Flow) that asked the UK Prime Minister to champion taps and toilets and call for a global framework for action may have come to an end. But there’ll be a new campaign to get involved in that will be running because the time is ripe for change in that area. So you can join with thousands and thousands of others – brothers and sisters in the global church – to get things changed for people who really need it.
Got a question that we haven’t answered here? Email youthcampaigns@tearfund.org and we’ll try and answer it for you.