The World Walks for Water and Sanitation

This advocacy effort, centred around community participation, seeks not to fundraise, but instead to apply political pressure for change to protect the right to safe drinking water and sanitation. Organisers of each year's walk are encouraged to invite local or national politicians to their events and to lobby them while they attend.

People interested in organising a walk in their country and registering it may visit the World Walks for Water and Sanitation website for resources, campaign guides, and other information. For example, the campaign toolkit contains background information, advocacy tools, walk tips, and a checklist for those organising a walk. The key is to plan an event based around a walk that is 6 kilometres (km) in length (either 6 km in total or broken into smaller walks that together make 6 km). An online map helps those organising or interested in taking part in events to find a walk happening nearby and/or to get in touch with the organiser to support it and work together. Organisers are asked to promote the campaign to their networks and encourage them to use it as a vehicle for national advocacy on sanitation, water, and health.

To cite a past example of a World Walks for Water and Sanitation experience, on World Water Day 2011, over 350,000 people in more than 75 different countries walked together for 6 km to demand an end to the water and sanitation crisis. The 2011 World Walks for Water event built on the success of the World's Longest Toilet Queue in 2010, and demanded that politicians in the North and the South keep their promises and step up their efforts to protect the right to water and sanitation for all people. The voices of these activists strengthened End Water Poverty's calls for change at the Fourth United Nations Conference on the Least Developed Countries in May 2011. "This directly resulted in an ambitious water and sanitation target being included in the Istanbul Programme of Action." For instance:

• 26,000 school children from 165 schools in the Flanders and Brussels regions of Belgium walked a combined total of almost 4 times around the world. They were addressed by the Mayor of Zele, who supported the event.
• In The Philippines, 2,000 people (including schoolchildren, teachers, and administrators) attended a walk organised by the Philippine Water Partnership. They were addressed by the country's President, Benigno Aquino Jr., who declared that the government is working towards resolving the water crisis.
• Campaigners in Uganda met their Minister for Water and the Environment, presenting her with a Civil Society Manifesto demanding that the government make water and sanitation a political and funding priority. Elsewhere in Uganda, over 50,000 people walked for water.
• 1,000 people marched through Monrovia, the capital of Liberia - a country where only 25% of people have access to water, and only 14% have access to basic sanitation.
• In the United Kingdom (UK), Tearfund and WaterAid organised a Walk for Water outside the Westminster parliament. Campaigners lobbied high-profile government ministers, such as the Secretary of State for International Development Andrew Mitchell, whilst walking.

For details on this year's walk, including a range of online materials (toolkits, press release templates, posters and policy info sheets by country), visit the World Walks for Water and Sanitation website.

Water and Sanitation.

According to organisers, "Unsafe drinking water and poor sanitation means children have to miss school and are dying needlessly from disease caused by contaminated water. Ending the water and sanitation crisis would help break the poverty cycle, would increase school attendance, and save lives....Safe drinking water and sanitation is a human right [per United Nations (UN) Resolution A/HRC/15/L.14] which must be upheld, and we need you to get involved and make a stand."

They also state that, "[i]n the run up to 2015, progress towards meeting the water and sanitation Millennium Development Goals (MDG) is frustratingly slow. The world is not on track to meet the MDG sanitation target by 2015; if current rates of progress continue, it will be missed in Sub-Saharan Africa by 200 years. It is more important than ever to maintain pressure on leaders at all levels to deliver on their promises."