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Investment in water can save a generation
By
Kuthula
Matshazi
WATER is a vital basic element of life and human right that has a significant
implication for human development and yet we continue to provide inadequate
resources whose consequences are being experienced mainly by poor people.
The United Nations Development Programme, in its 2006 Human Development Report titled Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and The Global Water Crisis has focused on the water problem that is caused by, among other factors, unequal power relationships, poverty and flawed management policies.
According to the UNDP, 1.1 billion people in the developing countries lack adequate access to water while 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation. We have to note the link between water and sanitation because each affects the other.
Lack of water could result in poor sanitation that brings about disease while contaminated water could cause illness or even death.
Water as a human development issue, according to the UNDP, allows people to lead a life that they value and enables them to realise their potential as human beings. Without clean water people cannot realise their potential because they could either die at birth or at any stage of their lives, or even fall into poverty. The provision of water to everyone is an issue of social justice and human security. The report states that deaths from water scarcity are higher than those inflicted by violent conflict. For instance, 1.8 million children die annually due to unclean water and sanitation.
Despite such a sad picture, the water situation has not been placed at the top of priorities in the public agenda. The UNDP report believes that this is so because those affected by water scarcity are poor people whose voice in the national and international discourse is subdued. It is these unequal power relations that ultimately affect what constitutes top priority in the public agenda.
If an issue cannot be prioritised in the public agenda to reflect its critical importance and the need to attend to it, then certainly when public policy is crafted, that obscure issue would be left out or relegated to a lower level of priorities.
The report notes that access to adequate water and sanitation in many countries mirrors the distribution of wealth.
“Access to piped water into the household averages about 85 percent for the wealthiest 20 percent of the population, compared with 25 percent for the poorest."
As if this is not enough, the poor also pay the highest prices for water mainly from private providers and in some instances even from public utilities.
The report shows, for example, that people living in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya and Jakarta in Indonesia pay 5-10 times more for water per unit than those in high-income areas of the same cities thereby restricting the amount of water the poor can purchase at any one time. International organisations such as the World Health Organisation recommend an average per capita water usage of 20 litres per day.
However, the report cites places such as Mozambique where the average per capita usage is about 10 litres a day while an individual in the United States uses about 575 litres per day.
The report further notes that bad water management policies have contributed to the reckless use of the water resource.
“The world has been indulging in an activity analogous to a reckless and unsustainable credit-financed spending spree."
We have been using much more water than we have and as a result accrued a deficit that will be transferred to future generations.
The UNDP believes
that the national accounting systems failed to prevent us from depleting
the precious resource coupled with effects of climate change. In some
cases, governments have supplied water at extremely low or even zero
rates. Such underpricing promotes carelessness or extravagant use of
water
in many instances.
The report suggests that while the availability of infrastructure to supply water varies between and within countries, it is imperative that governments invest adequate resources to bridge that gap in order to make water available to both the rich and poor. Community-led initiatives should guide public policy on prioritising substantial investment in water provision as opposed to those led by the private sector whose motive is mainly profit.
That is not to say the private sector cannot have a role to play. It has played a significant role, where necessary, in terms of providing finance and technology at affordable rates. On the belief that private initiatives possess the solution to the water problem, the UNDP says “private water markets offer a questionable solution to a systemic problem” because they have failed to promote the interests of the poor even in developed markets such as the US.
Ann-Christin Sjolander Holland in her 2005 book titled, The Water Business: Corporations Versus People also subscribes to this viewpoint.
After all, the report tells us that progress in water provision in the developed countries was achieved by the coming together of government and the people through the social contract that was based on “the idea of the common citizenship and the recognition of government responsibility”.
To achieve high
life expectancy, low child mortality rate and economic prosperity, 19th
Century Britain, for example, embarked on a comprehensive water reform
investment programme under the Public Health Act (1848) and the
Metropolitan Water Act (1852). These statutes ensured the provision
of clean water and adequate sanitation to the wider population at affordable
rates.
Sub-Saharan Africa should further scale up its attention to addressing the prevailing imbalanced access to water and sanitation. Southern and East Africa are forecast to experience significant water unavailability because of low rainfall and rising temperatures.
If we provide a comprehensive water provision programme, the report says that Sub-Sahara would save 203 000 child deaths by 2015 and one million within the next decade.
In addition, we could record economic benefits worth about US$15 billion annually. Such investments are critical in this neoliberal era where private interests have been largely responsible for shifting investment away from social services.
Kuthula Matshazi is a Zimbabwean journalist writing from Canada. He can be contacted at: kuthulamatshazi@yahoo.co.uk
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