Fikremariam Tesfaye
10 March 2008
Addis Ababa — UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Athlete Tirunesh Dibaba on Friday committed an amount of 95,000 birr for the provision of water supply in Arsi, Bekoji-her home town in the Oromia regional state.
The donation will go towards UNICEF-supported WASH activities and will be implemented in collaboration with the region's Water Resource Bureau.
The donation is meant to help strengthen the Ethiopian Millennium sanitation movement and foster the activities being undertaken by the Ethiopian government and other stakeholders in relation to the international Year of sanitation, according to UNICEF officials.
It will also help a Media Training For School Sanitation & Hygiene Competition, they said.
"It has been shown that when schools do not have water, attendance levels are significantly affected. Access to water in schools is therefore critical for young Ethiopians to achieve their life goals," Tirunesh said speaking to reporters along with UNICEF-Ethiopia Director Bjoern Ljungqvist at the Ethiopia Red Cross Training Centre in Southern Addis Ababa where she made the donation.
"This is especially important for youth girls who already have challenges with school attendance," the renowned athlete said.
The donation was made to coincide completion of media training conducted for school students drawn from four regions.
The media training was related to Schools' Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) Competition organized as part of the Government's Millennium WASH movement and the International Year of Sanitation.
Recognizing the cross-cutting importance of sanitation to all of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG's), the UN General Assembly has declared 2008 as the International Year of Sanitation (TYS).
"In order to achieve its goal of 100% adequate sanitation, Ethiopia needs to invest as much as 604 billion birr," noted Ljungqvist.
"While this is a huge investment requiring cooperation of government and major donors, small personal contributions made by committed Ethiopians such as Tirunesh can play an important part in improving communities and the lives of individuals" he said and thanked Tirunesh for being a role model for other Ethiopians to follow.
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