São Paulo, March 2024 – On March 22, World Water Day, Aegea signed a partnership agreement with the United Nations Children’s Fund for strengthening the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH using the acronym in English) Program.
A partnership to change the reality of thousands of Brazilian students
AOn March 22, World Water Day, Aegea signed a partnership agreement with the United Nations Children’s Fund for strengthening the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH using the acronym in English) Program.
This joint initiative will be conducted in municipalities located in the states of Ceará, Pará and Amazonas, to be selected during the course of 2024. More than 4000 children from 80 schools will benefit from the corresponding improvements in infrastructure.
Located in rural or suburban areas, the schools will benefit from work on improving water and sewage services, in this way bringing better conditions of student hygiene.
Special focus on socially vulnerable girls and women
Over a period of three years, the partnership will provide training for approximately 200 educational professionals and managers.
This group will receive guidance on the importance of sanitation, such as access to public funds for improvements in WASH at the schools, engaging the pedagogic community in the program’s agenda as well as fostering menstrual dignity and practices of hygiene.
Such activities contribute to achieving the targets set under Sustainable Development Goal 6 (SDG 6), which aims to ensure the availability and sustainable management of clean water and sanitation for all, but with particular reference to requirements of women and girls as well as socially vulnerable people in general.
Millions of children and adolescents without access to sanitation
NIn Brazil, 2.1 million children and adolescents (from 0 to 19) live without adequate access to treated water. Among the students, 1.2 million are registered with 7.5 million public schools where there is no suitable access to clean water. Indeed, there are 224 thousand boys and girls in 3000 schools where there is no access at all to clean drinking water.
This data is sourced from a Unicef analysis based on the Demographic Census 2022, Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE) – the Brazilian Federal Government Statistics Office -, and the School Census 2023 published by the Instituto Nacional de Estudos e Pesquisas Educacionais Anísio Teixeira (INEP/MEC).
“Sanitation services, the access to clean water, is a key human right, critical to the implementation of other rights, with a focus on the reduction of inequalities and poverty and providing quality education. This project with Aegea goes in this direction with a focus on our children and adolescents”, said Unicef’s Water, Sanitation and Hygiene officer in Brazil, Rodrigo Resende.
Joint efforts to change realities
“In our daily activities, we are witnesses of how access to the services of treated water, sewage collection and treatment transform for the better the life of families and above all, the positive intellectual development of children and adolescents in schools. And it is for this reason that we believe so much in this partnership that Aegea is commemorating with Unicef”, declares Édison Carlos, the president of the Aegea Institute.
Says Édison Carlos, joint efforts can change realities. “Parents, students, professors, and communities will be receiving notions of hygiene, concepts of sanitation, menstrual poverty, and other fundamental information for improving the quality of life. We believe in joint efforts for generating prosperity, particularly in the case of the most vulnerable”, he stressed.
More about Unicef
The United Nations Children’s Fund works in some of the toughest places on earth, reaching out to the most disadvantaged children in the world. In more than 190 countries and territories, it acts for each child, to build a better world for all.
In Brazil, TEM Água’s strategy seeks to contribute to the availability of treated water and sanitation services including the training of professionals in municipalities, for work in schools as well as indigenous communities and traditional peoples.
The aim of the strategy is to ensure safer environments for children, adolescents, and families in addition to fostering practices of hygiene in urban and rural areas, including under situations of emergency.
Commemorating the partnership
The signature of the partnership took place in Brasília, between Radamés Casseb, Aegea’s CEO and Youssouf Abdel-Jelil, representative of Unicef in Brazil. In addition to Édison Carlos, president of the Aegea Institute and Rodrigo Resende, Unicef WASH’s officer in Brazil, also present were Rogério Tavare, VP Institutional Relations at Aegea, Gregory Bulit, Unicef’s Emergencies and WASH coordinator in Brazil, Santiago Garcia, Unicef’s director for private sector partnerships in Brazil, Camila Carvalho, Unicef’s partnerships development head in Brazil and Carla Lorenzi, corporate alliances for Unicef in Brazil.
top