Access
Running water is available in many parts of the country, but most villages remain without it. Women in remote areas typically draw water from the nearest well, sometimes walking up to two hours each way twice a day. They may carry the water in pots on their heads or load them onto donkeys.
Statistics on access to water supply and sanitation in Yemen are contradictory. For example, the data from the latest census, carried out in 1997, are very different from data in a Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) carried out in the same year. For example, according to the census, 61% or urban households had access to water connections in their home, while according to the DHS the same figure was 70%. For rural areas the order is reversed. The census gives higher figures for access to house connections (25%) than the DHS (19%). The latest data used by the United Nation are from the 2004 Family and Health Survey and the 2006 Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey. Estimates for 2008 are made based on an extrapolation of trends from previous years.
In 2008, the United Nation’s Joint Monitoring Program for Water Supply and Sanitation estimated that only 62% of the Yemeni population had access to improved water source – including 28% from house connections and 34% from other improved water sources such as standpipes. Only 52% had access to improved sanitation. Access to improved water supply, using a broad definition of access, is estimated to be somewhat higher in urban areas than in rural areas (72% vs. 57%). The urban-rural gap is, however, much higher for improved sanitation (94% vs. 33%). Due to rapid population growth, access to water supply actually declined in relative terms from 67% in 1995 to 62% in 2008 despite a substantial increase in absolute access. However, access to improved sanitation increased from 28% to 52% during the same period, according to the estimates.
Read more about this topic: Water Supply And Sanitation In Yemen
Famous quotes containing the word access:
“The nature of women’s oppression is unique: women are oppressed as women, regardless of class or race; some women have access to significant wealth, but that wealth does not signify power; women are to be found everywhere, but own or control no appreciable territory; women live with those who oppress them, sleep with them, have their children—we are tangled, hopelessly it seems, in the gut of the machinery and way of life which is ruinous to us.”
—Andrea Dworkin (b. 1946)
“Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major—perhaps the major—stake in the worldwide competition for power. It is conceivable that the nation-states will one day fight for control of information, just as they battled in the past for control over territory, and afterwards for control over access to and exploitation of raw materials and cheap labor.”
—Jean François Lyotard (b. 1924)
“In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves.”
—Saul Bellow (b. 1915)