East Asian leaders vow to boost investment in sanitation

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JAKARTA, Dec 2 (Xinhua): Ministers and policy makers from East Asia have pledged in Japan to raise investment in sanitation and hygiene, and to provide strong leadership for action, in an effort to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the World Bank said in a statement released here yesterday.
Among the MDGs are to ensure environmental sustainability, and reduce extreme poverty and hunger, which still occur in East Asia, particularly in the region's least developed member countries.
The MDGs, scheduled to be achieved by 2015, were adopted by 192 member states of the United Nations at the millennium summit in 2000.
Some of the ways to achieve the goals are to reverse loss of environmental resources, reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water as well as to integrate the principles of sustainable development into the country policies and programme.
The East Asian leaders ended their two-day ministerial conference on sanitation and hygiene Saturday in Beppu City of Japan, the bank said.
They considered that sanitation played an important role in achieving the MDGs, it said.
The leaders pledged to take the necessary steps to comply with the goals for sanitation in their respective countries. They vowed to beef up investment in sanitation and hygiene promotion to benefit, in particular, the poor and marginalised who face the worst conditions and the most limited access to adequate facilities, it said.
"Improve the level of investment in sanitation and hygiene promotion in our respective countries while maintaining commensurate investments in domestic water supply," said one of the declaration resulted after the meeting.
The declaration is to include women, children and poor families in the planning and roll out of sanitation programmes, stressing that the role of individuals, and particularly women, is crucial to realising sanitation and hygiene gains, the statement said.
It also commits ministers and decision-makers to strive to ensure that schools, places of learning and health care facilities are equipped with sanitation facilities, said the statement.