Researcher(s):
Jordan McLuckie Tash Hood Isabelle Russenberger
ENVS course(s): 220 Initiated: November 2017 Completed: December 2017 Go to project site
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Access to safe drinking water and sanitation are two closely interrelated topics, essential for the global concerns of public health. As of 2017, 2.3 billion people lack access to basic sanitation facilities such as toilets or latrines (WHO 2017a). Despite goals set to reduce the number of people lacking access to sanitation, at least 2 billion people still use a drinking water source contaminated with faeces (WHO 2017b).
Below are our key questions:
Framing: How can safe drinking water and sanitation be more equitable in peripheral countries?
Focus: How is safe drinking water and sanitation distributed in Cuba?
For our quantitative analysis, we used 3 sets of data provided by the World Health Organization. We used country-scale data on Population using improved drinking-water sources (%), Population using improved sanitation facilities (%), and Population not using any sanitation facility (open defecation) (%) to see how Cuba’s status ranked with the rest of the world.
This project required us to examine the global distribution of safe drinking water and sanitation. Our results theoretically allowed us to understand the patterns of variation in distribution of these variables.
For our qualitative analysis, we created four different word-clouds from different documents: two academic reports on Cuba’s water system, an article from the International Development Research Centre, and a compilation of comments from various newspapers dealing with the water issue in Cuba today.
Our qualitative analysis showed that Cuba’s drinking water and sanitation access compare relatively well to the rest of the world. Our qualitative analysis contradict our earlier results, using terms including “cholera,” “crisis,” “and “outbreak.”
References:
World Health Organization. 2017a. “WHO | Drinking-Water.” WHO. 2017. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs391/en/.
———. 2017b. “WHO | Sanitation.” WHO. 2017. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs392/en/.