Only a small percentage of the Afghan population has access to adequate sanitation facilities and clean drinking water. In response, in the Northern Province of Faryab, ACTED Afghanistan is conducting a large scale campaign to sensitize rural population on good hygiene practices and to chlorinate water points to improve access to clean drinking water.
In Afghanistan, approximately 65 per cent of the urban and 81 per cent of the rural population do not have access to clean drinking water. As a result, Afghanistan is rife with cases of diarrhoea, cholera, dysentery and malaria. For every 1,000 children born in Afghanistan, close to 60 die from diarrhoeal disease before five.
ACTED is working with the support of the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the northern province of Faryab to increase access to clean drinking water and improve knowledge of good hygiene practices. In the last 3 months alone, 282 water sources have been chlorinated across the province, thus providing clean drinking water to 35,320 people. Chlorination is conducted regularly to ensure that sources are kept clean and that local communities are not at risk of water borne diseases.
Sensitization sessions are also regularly conducted in schools, clinics and villages, by community health workers and health promoters. By the end of the program, in 2016, ACTED hopes to have provided clean drinking water and hygiene sensitizations to close to 100,000 people. In the recent years, ACTED continued efforts have led to a 57% decrease in instances of waterborne disease, and ACTED hope to sustain and improve these results.