STOP PRESS SUCCESS STORY!
Bristol Soroptimists have raised enough money through their Spend a Penny Campaign to fund the building of a whole school toilet block in Muyebe – an extremely poor rural village in Uganda. We’ve helped young girls, like Bridget below, be able to look forward to a much healthier future and with no disruption to their education.
Find out more about Toilet Twinning at www.toilettwinning.org
SI Bristol – Spend a Penny Campaign
Aim: By donating a coin or two every time we go to the loo, to raise enough funds to become a toilet twinned Soroptimist group in Bristol.
What does this mean? By sponsoring and twinning a toilet (or toilet block) in a developing country, we’ll be providing basic sanitation, fresh water and hygiene education to a family or community who, at present, have none.
Why support toilet twinning? Lack of access to clean water and proper sanitation traps people in poverty and has a huge impact on the environment. Women and girls in particular suffer as a result – holding back their education and livelihoods. Without access to a toilet, women in particular are denied dignity and safety.
What does it cost? Just £60 will twin SI Bristol with a latrine halfway round the world and £240 will twin a whole school block!
Some hard statistics:
- Poor sanitation is one of the world’s biggest killers; it hits women, children, elderly and sick people hardest.
- More than half of primary schools, in developing countries don’t have access to water and sanitation. Without toilets, girls often drop out at puberty (Unicef).
- The lack of a loo makes women and girls a target for sexual assault as they go to the toilet in the open, late at night. Many get bitten by snakes as they squat in the grass.
- In Africa alone, people spend 40 billion hours every year just walking to collect water. Women and girls carry two-thirds of this burden.
- Every day, about 1,400 children under the age of five die of illnesses linked to unclean water and poor sanitation. That’s more than half a million a year – or about one a minute (Unicef).
Let’s flush away poverty!
Other Awareness Raising:
SI Bristol has written to nine MPs in Bristol and the surrounding area urging them to press the government to speak out strongly at the United Nations (UN) to ensure there is a dedicated Sustainable Development Goal on water and sanitation when the new global goals for 2015-2030 are set in September. The United Nations are setting these goals in an attempt to end extreme poverty in the world.
WaterAid has produced a report “Another Great Stink” urging government support for this UN dedicated sustainable goal. The report, which SI Bristol will give to each of the nine Bristol and district MPs already contacted, also marks the 150th anniversary of the completion of London’s Victorian sewerage system. Because sewerage caused such a Great Stink in the Houses of Parliament in 1858, MPs at that time took some decisive action!