Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to honour PM Modi with Goalkeepers Global Goals Award

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will be honouring PM Modi with the prestigious ‘Global Goalkeeper Award’ for his leadership and commitment for improving access to sanitation in India.

PM Modi will be honoured for his leadership of the Swachch Bharat Mission which aims at accelerating the efforts to achieve universal sanitation coverage in the country by this year as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi on his 150th birth anniversary.

Goalkeepers Global Goals Award

The Goalkeepers Global Goals Award honours individuals for their extraordinary stories of remarkable individuals taking action to bring the Global Goals to life and help achieve them by 2030.

The annual awards are presented in five categories to leaders and individuals for their efforts in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The categories are Progress, Changemaker, Campaign, Goalkeepers Voice and the Global Goalkeeper.

The Goalkeepers Global Goals Award 2019 will honour those individuals working to tackle the issues contributing to global inequity.

How Swachch Bharat Mission has made a turnaround for Sanitation in India?

More than 90 million toilets have been built to eliminate open defecation by October 2, 2019, and currently, 98 per cent of India’s villages have rural sanitation coverage instead of 38 per cent four years ago.

The foundation has stated that “Before the Swachh Bharat Mission, over 500 million people in India did not have access to safe sanitation, and now, the majority do. There is still a long way to go, but the impacts of access to sanitation in India are already being realised. The Swachh Bharat mission can serve as a model for other countries around the world that urgently need to improve access to sanitation for the world’s poorest.”