Background

If our global experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that in our interconnected world we are only as safe as the most vulnerable among us. A virus that grows and mutates anywhere poses an increased threat to people everywhere. In this context, a massive and concerted global effort to address the essential needs of the world’s most vulnerable population is not an act of charity but a pragmatic imperative for humanity to survive and thrive.

As billions of people around the world remain unnecessarily exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the devastating consequences of our collective failure to build a world where all humans are protected, even though theoretical commitments already exist to fix these problems, it’s time for a new approach to helping the world’s most vulnerable populations. This effort cannot be carried out piecemeal, but systemically and through concerted global action for the common good.

Nation states are built to maximize their own citizens’ interests and safety.  But our world actually becomes far less safe, as we are now witnessing, when states seek to optimize national benefits at the expense of shared, global responsibilities. This contradiction is sadly apparent when our toughest modern challenges stay unsolved, and in some cases unaddressed, decade after decade. Nations have adopted the UN’s Strategic Development Goals (SDGs) in theory, but what has been missing – seen in sharp relief during this crisis – is true collaboration, that supersedes old thinking and puts adequate and sufficiently-funded strategies to work on an urgent basis to solve our world’s greatest common problems.

For decades, people and organizations around the world have advocated for the WASH (water, sanitation, and hygiene) agenda as a way to help vulnerable people. Others have advocated to strengthen public health systems and pandemic preparedness (PAP). Covid-19 has shown us that WASH and PAP are fully connected, seen in the grave consequences of disease and economic deprivation experienced by our earth’s most vulnerable populations, but problem-solving remains disjointed. Fixing WASHPAP, therefore, must be an urgent and essential component of our global response to COVID-19 and our preparation for future pandemics, and a model for solving other complex problems. Ensuring WASHPAP for all, and effectively addressing the big issues of our time, are not acts of charity, but insurance.

Well over two million people are now dead from a pandemic that could and should have been avoidable. Billions have seen their lives and livelihoods disrupted. We know that our current system cannot manage the next pandemic or the next major natural disaster. A Cambridge University study estimates that the total economic cost of the COVID-19 pandemic will be $82 trillion over five years. The question for all of us, and for our leaders, is what percentage of that massive cost could we have invested in building a safer world for all through smart and cost-effective investments in WASHPAP for all. Because we are likely to face even worse pandemics in the future, we must start making those of investments now.

We do not have a moment to waste changing our approach. Our lives depend on the global WASHPAP challenge being addressed and the basic safety needs of the world’s most vulnerable populations being met. Our leaders must take decisive collective action to protect all of us by protecting the most vulnerable among us.  At the G20 meeting in November 2020, the most powerful leaders on earth acknowledged that “affordable, reliable, and safe water, sanitation, and hygiene services are essential for human life and that access to clean water is critical to overcome the pandemic.”

In this moment of global crisis, member states of the United Nations have a unique, historic, and essential opportunity to champion a new approach to solving our greatest global challenges in the name of our common good. This can be a turning point, when we recognize that the health and well-being of all of us reside within each of us in our interdependent world and commit to develop, fund, and implement a binding strategy for ensuring safe drinking water, basic sanitation and hygiene, and essential protection from deadly pandemics for everyone on earth by 2030.