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	Dr. Denis Mukwege: “It is an honor for me to serve these courageous women" by Sakharov Prize Committee, Human Rights First Democratic Republic of Congo   Oct 2014   Congo doctor Denis Mukwege wins Europe''s top human rights prize. (Alertnet)   A Nobel-prize nominated Congolese gynaecologist who survived an attempt on his life in 2012 has won the European Parliament''s Sakharov Prize for helping victims of sexual violence in his country.   "The Sakharov Prize is a strong signal, telling the women they have not been abandoned to a barbaric fate. It tells them that the world listens to them," Mukwege said in a statement.   "It is a message of encouragement and hope for all those who struggle for their human rights, for peace and democracy in the DRC and all over the world", he said.   The 59-year-old doctor founded the Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, South Kivu province, in 1998, to help women and girls who had been raped during the conflict then raging in Democratic Republic of Congo.   Although the Congo war officially ended in 2003, violence between government troops and rebels, some with outside backing, has persisted, particularly in the east, and rape has repeatedly been used as a weapon of war.   More than half a million women have been raped in Congo, which one senior U.N. official called the rape capital of the world.   Mukwege''s hospital treats about 2,000 women a year for their injuries.   In 2012 armed men tried to kill Mukwege in one of the most violent parts of the country. The doctor escaped unhurt, but one of his staff was killed.   Mukwege was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and remains a strong advocate of women''s rights in his country. He still sees patients and performs surgery two days a week.   Mukwege dedicated the award to defenders of human rights, men and women, who work in difficult conditions, and to Congolese people.   "This prize will only have a meaning if you accompany us on the path to peace, justice and democracy", he said.   Sept 2013   Dr. Denis Mukwege: “It is an honor for me to serve these courageous women". (Human Rights First)   Dr. Denis Mukwege is a gynecologist and activist in the Democratic Republic of Congo (the DRC), a place the United Nations has called “the rape capital of the world.” A leading expert in a grim specialty, Dr. Mukwege has devoted the last 15 years to healing women who have been traumatized by rape and calling for those who commit this horrific crime to be brought to justice.   Last September, Dr. Mukwege gave a speech at the United Nations condemning impunity for rape in his country, openly criticizing the international community and the Congolese government for their inaction. On October 25, 2012, Dr. Mukwege survived an assassination attempt during which his bodyguard was killed. Dr. Mukwege and his family were forced to flee the country. Despite continued threats, Dr. Mukwege decided to return to the DRC in January. Congolese women lined the 20-mile stretch from the airport to Bukavu to welcome him home.   Dr. Mukwege has resumed his essential work at Panzi Hospital, which he founded and where he and his colleagues provide thousands of survivors of rape with psychological, medical, socio-economic, and legal support. Despite ongoing personal risk, Dr. Mukwege continues to speak out.   Dr. Mukwege"s work has earned numerous international awards including the UN Human Rights Prize, King Baudouin Africa Development Prize, African of the Year, Olof Palme Prize and Clinton Global Citizen Award, while the Carter Foundation has named him a "citizen of the world".   http://www.panzihospital.org/ http://www.panzihospital.org/projects/panzi-foundation-drc http://drc.vday.org/about-city-of-joy/ http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=53482#.VvCPGEdq1hE Visit the related web page
	Toilets shouldn’t be a dirty word by Girish Menon WaterAid, agencies   WaterAid’s Director of International Programmes Girish Menon opened the debate on Water, Sanitation and Sustainable Energy in the Post-2015 Development Agenda at the UN General Assembly in New York.   I spent this morning talking toilets at the UN. Of all the potential topics of conversation with global decision-makers, needing the toilet might not be high on your list. We all do it on a daily basis but in polite conversation, it appears we’d prefer not to talk about it.   Whether we like it or not, the silence surrounding how we dispose of our bodily waste has to be broken. The health, prosperity and wellbeing of 2.5 billion people rests on it – 2.5 billion people who right now have nowhere to go to the toilet.   This lack of basic sanitation facilities causes diseases that kill 2,000 children under the age of five every single day. As well as gross indignity, women and girls in particular face sexual harassment and even violence when defecating in the open.   When the Millennium Development Goals were first agreed in 2000, sanitation wasn’t included. It was added later, as an afterthought. And now, progress towards the sanitation MDG target is massively off-track – in fact, it is one of the most off-track targets of all.   When the MDGs expire in 2015, a new set of ‘sustainable’ development goals and targets will replace them. It is vital that sanitation, along with safe water and hygiene, is at the forefront of this new framework.   For the last three years, the water and sanitation sector has been discussing possible targets for the post-2015 framework. 200 organisations from around the world, including WaterAid, have come together in a process facilitated by the World Health Organisation and Unicef’s Joint Monitoring Programme. This consultation has led to a Furthermore, it includes a target on water and sanitation so that by 2030:   No one practises open defecation. Every household, every school and every health centre has drinking water, sanitation and hygiene. The proportion of the population without access at home to safely managed drinking water and sanitation is halved. Inequalities in access are progressively eliminated.   We needs member states to hold true to the ambition of creating a post-2015 framework that can both eradicate extreme poverty and achieve sustainable development. It requires convincing donor and developing country governments to increase their financing for water, sanitation and hygiene.   It requires us to get better at making projects sustainable, so that the taps and toilets built today are still working in a decade’s time. It requires us to move beyond serving just the easy-to-reach, to include all those who live in rural and remote areas, or who find their access limited by disability, gender, or ethnicity.   This crisis can be tackled if national governments, donors, NGOs, civil society coalitions and the private sector work together to transform the lives of the world’s poorest people.   All over the world, people now recognise the importance of safe sanitation not just to the world’s poorest people but to all of us. Two million people have called for governments to commit to reaching everyone, everywhere with safe water and sanitation. Now it is time to act.   Lack of toilets blights the lives of 2.5bn people.   UN deputy secretary general says failure to address sanitation and open defecation threatens disaster for third of humanity.   The world’s lack of progress in building toilets and ending open defecation is having a “staggering” effect on the health, safety, education, prosperity and dignity of 2.5 billion people, the UN deputy secretary general, Jan Eliasson, has warned.   Speaking as the UN prepares to debate a new set of development goals – and in the aftermath of the rape and murder of two Indian girls who were attacked as they ventured into a field to relieve themselves – Eliasson said failure to address the issue of sanitation would prove disastrous for a third of humanity.   “Sanitation is cross-cutting: if you make progress on sanitation, then you dramatically improve the achievement of at least four other goals,” he told the Guardian.   “One of the main reasons for child mortality is diarrhoea and dysentery because of bad water and a lack of sanitation. You get a much better way of working with maternal health issues: I can’t tell you how many women are dying in childbirth because of a lack of clean water. You’ll affect education, because people can’t go to school when they have these huge problems, and you will have productive people who can go to work.”   Eliasson said building toilets for women was fundamental to gender equality, education – and safety. “In Africa, in particular, there is an unfortunate situation where girls don’t have toilets in their schools,” he said. “It’s very easy to arrange them for the boys, but girls require more privacy. And then you get into the area that we saw in that horrible example in India, when the girls went out at night and were raped and killed. This is done in innumerable cases: men preying on young girls who are going out like that.”   According to the UN, 2.5 billion people still lack “improved sanitation facilities” – defined as ones that “hygienically separate human excreta from human contact”, down only 7% since 1990, when 2.7 billion lacked access, and more than a billion people – most of whom live in rural areas – have to defecate in gutters, behind bushes or into water.   More people have access to mobile phones than toilets, it says.   “This, for me, is one of the most drastic and sad examples of the loss of dignity: allowing 1.1 billion people in 22 countries to practise open defecation,” said Eliasson. “Apart from the human dignity aspect, there is the health aspect and the environmental aspect.”   Eliasson, a former chairman of WaterAid Sweden, said he was driven to speak out by memories of the children he had seen die from diarrhoea, dysentery and dehydration. “It’s a very concrete challenge and it’s not rocket science,” he said. “We need to do something about it.”   Although he was heartened to see governments belatedly waking up to the importance of sanitation, progress has been far too slow. The millennium development goal (MDG) on sanitation – which aims to halve the proportion of the population without sustainable access to basic sanitation by the end of next year – is unlikely to be met, he said.   “I think we have seen progress on water, although there are still 780 million people without safe water. But I am sad to say that we have not seen the same pace of progress on sanitation. On the contrary, I would say the sanitation goal is one of the most lagging of all the goals, and that is why we have tried our best to speed up the work for achieving it by the end of next year.” He said the fact that sanitation and water are likely to have their own standalone place among the sustainable development goals (SDG), which will succeed the MDGs, was “a sad confirmation” of international inaction. But he said he was at least encouraged to see it was already a high priority; during the formulation of the MDGs it had to be added by a specific resolution.   Age-old taboos around toilets and defecation, he added, were finally breaking down. He pointed to India, where the new prime minister, Narendra Modi, tackled the issue during his election campaign, calling on the nation to build “toilets first and temples later”.   In sub-Saharan Africa, too, the issue is increasingly on the agenda. In July, the prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo – a state blighted by sexual violence – told the Guardian provision of toilets had a direct bearing on education and gender equality. “It’s not just about classrooms, you also need toilets, and providing toilets for boys and toilets for girls limits the risk of girls being attacked when they go to the toilet,” said Augustin Matata Ponyo. “And that provision encourages parents to send their children to school, because they feel reassured that those toilets mean their daughters won’t be attacked.”   Eliasson said he would be very surprised if water, sanitation and hygiene did not figure “very highly” in the SDGs. “It’s such a good investment: invest in sanitation and you will have concrete results with positive changes for people’s lives,” he said. “The economic losses are tremendous and the economic gains are enormous.”   He said the focus now needed to switch from rural areas to urban ones as more and more people leave their traditional ways of life in search of opportunities in towns and cities where no infrastructure exists.   “It’s most often the poor people who move into the urban, sprawling areas of poor countries, and the infrastructure does not exist, and the collective water and sanitation arrangements are not made,” he said. “That’s when you have the big risks of outbreaks of diarrhoea and dysentery.”   Asked what the consequences of any further inaction would be for the hundreds of millions of people still in desperate need of a clean and safe place to defecate, he was blunt: “They would be disastrous. We simply have to do this.”   The international coalition seeking to break the taboos around the twin issues of toilet provision and open defecation is an unlikely one, comprising among others, a 73-year-old Swedish diplomat, the government of Singapore and a bright green Sesame Street resident by the name of Raya.   Eliasson has long campaigned for improved sanitation. Sometimes, he reflects, undiplomatic language is called for.   “I remember I finished a speech once, where the original text was, ‘We have to work for a life of dignity for all’. And that was code language for sanitation,” he says. “I changed that line to: ‘We have to work for a world of toilets for all’.   Eliasson says things have moved on since, especially as the term open defecation – “which is a euphemism in itself” – entered diplomatic discourse.   Credit, he says, must also go to Singapore, which last year successfully proposed that the UN designate 19 November as World Toilet Day as a way of focusing global attention on sanitation issues.   Last but not least is Raya, whose brief is to teach children in Bangladesh, India and Nigeria about the importance of proper toilet habits.   “We need more toilets,” she told the UN in May. “With more toilets in schools and pledges around the world, we can stop millions of children and grown-ups from getting sick. Then we can remind everyone to wear shoes and sandals when they go to the toilet … and to wash their hands.” Visit the related web page
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