Health & Sanitation

  • Diseases from unsafe water and lack of basic sanitation kill more people every year than all forms of violence, including war. That’s wrong. We all have the right to clean water. Oxfam is providing life-saving clean water, and sanitation and hygiene education in some of the world’s poorest countries, as well as in areas struck by humanitarian crises.

How to wash your hands, the right way

Posted by: Seren Nurgun

What was the last surface you touched? Did you touch your face afterwards?

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), studies suggest that coronaviruses (including preliminary information on the COVID-19 virus) may stay on surfaces for a few hours or up to several days.

The WHO is advising everyone, regardless of age, to regularly and thoroughly wash your hands for at least 20 seconds. This helps eliminate any viruses that may be on your hands.

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How To Wash Your Hands | Oxfam Ireland

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Oxfam has been providing safe clean water and helping prevent disease around the world since the 1960s. Check out more here.

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Cyclone Idai: One year on, communities are still suffering

Posted by: Alice Dawson

Cyclone Idai made landfall on 14th March 2019, destroying livelihoods and homes across southern Africa. Today, hundreds of thousands of people in Zimbabwe, Malawi and Mozambique are still suffering the consequences of one of the worst cyclones to hit Africa.

family taking refuge under temporary shelter
Maria, 31, with her six children with their only belongings sheltering from the rain by the side of the road. Photo: Elena Heatherwick/Oxfam

A new Oxfam briefing, After the Storm, reveals that thousands of people in Mozambique and Zimbabwe are still living in destroyed or damaged homes and makeshift shelters, with an estimated 8.7 million people in desperate need of food as a result of extreme weather events and localised conflict. Critical infrastructure including roads, water supplies, and schools remain in disrepair, making it even more difficult for people to access vital services or get back to work.

A toxic combination of factors – including an intensifying cycle of floods, drought and storms; deep rooted poverty and inequality; a patchy humanitarian response; and the lack of support for poor communities to adapt to changing climate or recover from disaster – have increased people’s vulnerability and made it harder for people to recover.

flooded shops and homes in Mozambique
Flooded shops and homes in Lamego district, Mozambique as of February 2020. Photo: Elena Heatherwick/Oxfam

Virginia Defunho, a farmer who lives in Josina Machel village in Mozambique with her husband and seven children, lost everything in the cyclone - their home, crops, chickens and most of their possessions. She replanted her fields in December, but her crops were damaged by another severe flood this January. Oxfam’s partner Kulima is providing Virginia with tools and seeds to plant again on a rented plot on higher ground.

“The hardest thing now is the lack of food. Sometimes I go to bed hungry. The child cries, wanting something to eat, and it makes me feel angry sometimes, because the child is crying because he wants food and there is nothing to give.

friends join together to adapt to climate change
Amelia (right) and Virginia (left) have been neighbours since 1996. They cannot farm where they live any more because of frequent flooding so they are renting plots on higher ground to grow crops using the seeds provided. Photo: Elena Heatherwick/Oxfam

“Idai has destroyed my mind. I have a child who has succeeded to grade ten, but I don't have the money to pay for him to enrol back at school. If life was normal, I would have some crops to sell and I would get some money and my child would be back at school.   

“We are worried about the future because we don't know if the weather is going to be like this or if it will change back to normal like it was before. We worry about another cyclone coming. If it comes a second time, what will our lives be? How is it going to be?”

Oxfam raised funds to assist people across Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe in the aftermath of the cyclones. With our partners, we provided emergency assistance such as food aid, blankets and hygiene kits; installed latrines and water pumps in temporary camps; and helped raise awareness of issues such as gender-based violence - which often spikes after a disaster. In the long term, Oxfam is working with communities to help them adapt in the face of a changing climate – for example by helping smallholder farmers diversify their crops and adapt their farming techniques.

Cyclone Idai is just one of many extreme weather events to have hit southern Africa in recent years. Despite the escalating climate crisis, poor communities are not getting the help they need to adapt, and world leaders have failed to ensure a dedicated global fund to help countries rebuild from the loss and damage caused by climate fuelled disasters.

Donate now to support Oxfam’s work in southern Africa and beyond.

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Rohingya crisis: Support Fashion Relief and make a difference

Posted by: Seren Nurgun

Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh

There's more to Fashion Relief than bagging a bargain or spotting your favourite celeb - it can make a real difference to families bearing the brunt of war and climate change.

Shoppers at Fashion Relief events will be supporting the world's most vulnerable communities - they include thousands of Rohingya people forced to flee Myanmar when conflict broke out in 2017. Around 700,000 people fled to neighbouring Bangladesh, settling in Cox's Bazar. With 1 million people now calling it home, it is the world's largest refugee camp.

Lorraine Keane recently visited Bangladesh to see Oxfam's work on the ground for herself. So far, we've distributed vital aid including clean water and food to 360,000 people in Cox's Bazar.

Fashion Relief at Cox's Bazar | Oxfam Ireland

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We’re helping people stay healthy by installing water points, toilets and showers, and distributing soap and other essentials. We’ve recruited more than 600 Rohingya volunteers to help us reach others with hygiene information, we’ve built the biggest-ever sewage plant in a refugee camp on site and our solar-powered water network delivers safe water to families.

Oxfam staff hears Rohingya refugee opinions on new latrines
The women’s social architecture latrine user group talks to Iffat (Oxfam Senior Innovation Officer in Public Health Promotion & Community Engagement) about their first experiences using the latrine and bathing facilities. Photo: Salahuddin Ahmed

We've also provided 25,000 refugee households with vouchers that can be exchanged at local markets for fresh vegetables and ingredients. We’ve hired over 1,800 Bangladeshi locals to work on construction projects including road repairs, schools and water sources and provided almost 400 people with grants to start or expand their small businesses.

new Oxfam food voucher system for refugees
An efficient new e-voucher system enables refugees to make their purchase by simply scanning a card pre-charged with credit. Photo: Maruf Hasan/Oxfam

To help women feel safer after dark, we’ve installed more than 350 solar-powered streetlights around the camp and provided 20,000 torches and portable solar lanterns. We’ve also worked with women refugees to design more secure toilets and supplied them with fabric and vouchers so they can make or order clothes they feel more comfortable wearing in public.

Oxfam bought light to parts of Cox's Bazar
Oxfam has brought light to parts of the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh. Photo: Maruf Hasan/Oxfam

Sustainability in action

Fashion Relief is a key part of our work to increase sustainability across the fashion industry and support fair pay for garment workers. According to the UN, the textile industry generates more emissions than the aviation and shipping industries combined!

That's no surprise when 225,000 tonnes of clothes end up in landfill in Ireland each year. That's 225,000 tonnes of clothes not getting a second chance at life.

On top of that, cheap production and plummeting prices means the items we buy often end up in landfill before they should, while garment workers survive on low wages and more often than not experience poor working conditions [Source: Irish Tech News].

Join us on a journey to a more sustainable lifestyle, starting with the clothes you wear. We're proud to be a solution to "throwaway fashion" by reducing the amount of clothes and textiles that end up in landfill and giving pre-loved clothes a longer life. We also work with retailers, encouraging them to donate their end-of-line or excess stock to us instead of sending it to landfill. That's a more sustainable solution for people and planet!

Support Fashion Relief

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How toilets fight poverty

Posted by: siddhesh.jaiswa...

Safe water, good hygiene, and improved sanitation save lives

Whether in an emergency, or for everyday use at home or at school, toilets are essential. Yet, more than 4.5 billion people don’t have a proper toilet. That’s according to the UN and the good people behind its World Toilet Day effort, launched in 2013 and celebrated every year on November 19, which raises awareness about the role toilets play in fighting poverty.

 

Living in a world without decent toilets (especially ones connected to a system that safely handles waste) puts people at risk of disease, pollutes the environment, and discourages girls from attending school.

That’s why Oxfam provides toilets, clean water, and encourages good hygiene practices in the wake of natural disasters and other emergencies, and works with communities to build decent latrines and proper sanitation systems for everyday use. Safe water, good hygiene, and improved sanitation can save as many as 842,000 lives per year, according to the UN. Toilets can actually save lives!

See for yourself the difference toilets make, every day and in emergencies.

Toilets and Clean Water Overlooked Essentials

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See for yourself

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Back to School: Help Open a Child’s Door

Posted by: Seren Nurgun

Children at Al Rusul school for girls in Mosul, Iraq. Photo: Tegid Cartwright/Oxfam

For a good bit of us here in Ireland, it’s back to school time, which means parents and children are back to stressing about making it out of the door in the mornings on-time. Five minutes late? That’s no bother to some children going back to school in Iraq right now as they also worry about clean and safe access to toilets. Did you know that more than 1/2 of schools in Iraq need rehabilitation and 2.5 million children need help to access education?

Returning Home

During the three-year reign of terror by ISIS, Iraq’s once thriving city of Mosul was torn apart by fighting. Homes, health centres and schools were bombed and shattered to pieces. For many of Mosul’s children and their loved ones, their happy memories and old lives have all gone as children have seen their parents, grandparents or siblings being killed. They’ve lived under the daily terror of violent occupation. Without schooling, only 5% of 8 to 9-year-olds can now read and solve math problems at an appropriate grade level.

When it was safe for Bibi, a student, to return to her old primary school in west Mosul, she found it was a shell. An empty shell. The windows had been blown out, the furniture was broken, and the classrooms empty, void of the children’s work that had once filled their walls. The school’s sanitation system had been destroyed. There was no running water and the toilet floors were covered in rubbish, mud and faeces. The stench was so bad it made the children feel sick.

“When ISIS came, I stayed here for awhile and then I was told to leave. It [the school] was destroyed, the furniture was broken. All our records were all over the floor. There was nothing left for us. Two years of the students’ lives are gone.”
- Muna Husein Kadu, Headteacher at the Al Rusul Primary School for girls
Iraq toilets Mosul - Back To School
The bathrooms in Al Rusul school for girls before Oxfam carried out rehabilitation work to install clean and sanitary toilets and sinks for the students to use. Photo: Tegid Cartwright/Oxfam

Back to School

In west Mosul, families are gradually returning home to rebuild their lives after the conflict with ISIS, and over the last few months children have started slowly going back to school to restart their education. Oxfam’s teams have helped to rehabilitate the water and sanitation systems in over 30 key schools, ensuring hundreds of children going back to school have a safe and sanitary environment in which to learn. This work is complemented by educational sessions on hygiene that teach children about the importance of keeping themselves and the environment clean through interactive games. These sessions also serve as a fun way for the children to engage with each other and rebuild friendships. 
In just three days – that’s right, just three days – Oxfam workers on the ground rebuilt the sanitation system at Bibi’s school, the Al Rusul Primary School for girls. This is the fast, effective, and life-changing difference we can bring to children in Iraq with the support of donors. Now more than half of the schools in Iraq need rehabilitation, along with hundreds of schools in war-torn countries like Syria. We must make sure they have a better future. In three days, we can help protect their future. Together, we can help Mosul’s children get an education, and avoid a lifetime of poverty. We can make sure that boys and girls are in school and not at risk of being worked to the bone – for as little as 10,000 dinars (less than nine dollars a day) – as child labourers. With so many obstacles already making it hard for Mosul’s children to get an education, sanitation should not be one of them.
“The kids are the ones with the hope. They want to carry on and progress”.
- Muna Husein Kadu, Headteacher at the Al Rusul Primary School for girls

How to fix toilets in three days | Oxfam Ireland

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To make a difference in a child-in-need’s life today, consider sending a quick donation through the button below.

#BacktoSchool #Mosul #Iraq

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