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Millennium Development Goals

Somali woman collects water © Rachel Stabb / Oxfam Great Britain

Water and sanitation targets feature under environmental sustainability - Goal 7 - of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The wording calls on governments to "halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and sanitation". Taking into account population growth from the baseline date of 1990, the target necessitates the introduction of safe water to an estimated 1.5 billion people and basic sanitation to 2.0 billion over the 25-year period. The logistical challenge behind these stark figures must embrace immense differences of topography, climate and culture, as well as the gulf between urban and rural human settlements.

A progress monitoring report jointly released by UNICEF and the World Health Organisation (WHO) in August 2004 suggested that, although the drinking water target may be achieved in terms of absolute numbers, poorer countries are being left behind. For example, despite advancing from 49% coverage in Sub-Saharan Africa in 1990 to 58% in 2002, this rate is far too slow to meet the target by 2015.

The sanitation target is more fundamentally at risk as improvements are failing even to keep pace with global population growth. Although more than a billion people gained access to improved sanitation between 1990 and 2002, the numbers without sanitation coverage decreased by only 100 million. Millions of people in India are condemned to the indignity of open defacation; 76% of people in rural South Asia, lack access to a hygienic toilet whilst in urban areas of Indonesia the figure is 50 million.

Water carriers, Guatemala © Andy Narracott

Amongst the many measures put forward to bolster this flagging progress, the most consistent recommendation centres on the concept of water as a human right, this having been omitted from the original Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In 2002, the UN Committee on Economic, Cultural and Social Rights adopted a proposal to recognise water as a human right, thereby placing considerable obligation on countries to fulfil individuals’ rights to safe drinking water and sanitation. Through 2007 the UN Human Rights Council is engaged in taking this issue further forward.

Water for Life and the Year of Sanitation

Partly due to unclear definitions of “access”, there have been considerable difficulties in placing a monetary value on delivering the water and sanitation targets with estimates ranging from $9-$30 billion pa. Nevertheless, cost/benefit evaluations invariably show that benefits in terms of economic output and health savings outweigh the costs, a crucial consideration for international donors. Such equations do no more than reproduce in financial language what development professionals have been saying for years – that provision of safe water and sanitation is the lynchpin to human and economic development in poor communities.

Collecting water in Chennai © Peter Armstrong

Poor access condemns women and children to spend hours in water collection; time that could instead be utilized for income generation and education, especially for female children. And unsafe drinking water and poor sanitation are the cause of severe health problems throughout the developing world. Millions of the world’s poorest people – mainly women and children - die from water-related diseases each year. For example, diarrhoea can be both prevented and cured by the most simple means. Yet this disease is likely to account for the deaths of 2.2 million children under age 5 during 2007; its control will be a determining factor in MDG strategies.

Access to clean water and safe sanitation therefore correlates closely with other critical MDG targets such as child mortality, gender equity and enrolment in education, and severe poverty. In China there is recognition that pollution and scarcity of water could undermine the country's spectacular progress in poverty reduction, and indeed stall its economic boom. Governments are being encouraged to recognise that, without success in water and sanitation, the entire MDG concept may be in jeopardy.

To reinforce this message, the UN has proclaimed the period 2005-2015 to be the International Decade for Action – Water for Life, and the year 2008 as the Year of Sanitation, with the aim of injecting some urgency into strategies for achieving the water and sanitation targets.
Water and Sanitation in Global Politics

The combined pressure of this high level UN support, the favourable cost/benefit analysis, and powerful rights-based advocacy has not yet generated the desired sense of urgency. The NGO community was particularly frustrated at the apparent neglect of water and sanitation issues at the 2005 Global Summit to review MDG progress, and at the timid approach of the 4th World Water Forum held in Mexico in 2006.

A necessary correction was provided by the UN Human Development Report (HDR) for 2006, “Beyond Scarcity: Power, poverty and the global water crisis”, a title reflecting the view that poor governance lies behind water problems rather than any shortage of the resource. In an unusually hard-hitting analysis, the HDR asserts that the “global crisis in water……reinforces the obscene inequalities of life that divide rich and poor".

The HDR laments the absence of any clear global plan for achieving the water and sanitation targets, nor sufficiently detailed national strategies. It also calls for higher priority for water and sanitation in rich countries' aid budgets. which currently allocate about $3 billion pa to the sector, less than 5% of all aid. In the 4 years following the Millennium Declaration, the proportion of foreign aid dedicated to water and sanitation actually fell and only 17% benefited the poorest “Least Developed Countries”. Furthermore, campaigners feel that the conditions imposed by donors can be incompatible with the underlying task of creating access to clean water for poor people.

Water privatisation protest in Bolivia © Julie Plasencia / AP / The UNESCO Courier

This particular concern attracts its most forceful articulation on the subject of privatisation of public water supplies, typically but not exclusively in major conurbations where migratory populations are mushrooming beyond formal recognition by city service providers. In such an environment, a multinational utility corporation will tend to target its services to middle class areas and set prices beyond the pockets of the poor.

The subject is complex and lends itself to oversimplification and slogans. Nevertheless, whilst there are some examples of successful water privatisation in the developing world, the balance of evidence points towards failure, often at the hands of some of the world’s major corporations. There are signs that some donor governments and even the World Bank may be pulling back from their unquestioning stance on water privatisation and the water companies are said to be reducing investment plans for developing countries. But the multi-agency UN World Water Development report for 2006 warned that “it would be a mistake” to write off any role for the private sector and controversies are rumbling on in many major cities of the world.
Water and Sanitation in Local Politics

Waiting for water © Catholic Relief Services

Developing countries themselves have a far from passive role to play if the MDG targets are to be achieved. They too are guilty of attaching insufficient priority to water and even less to sanitation in national poverty plans. Of particular importance is the need to strengthen local government capacity to deliver infrastructure projects and to reform inefficiency and bureaucracy.

Governance issues in water and sanitation stretch all the way to the beneficiary communities themselves. It has been demonstrated over and again that success in water and sanitation programmes depends on creating a sense of ownership amongst the beneficiaries themselves.

Women are the primary users of water in cooking, washing and tending livestock - and will often play the key roles in organising village-level structures to ensure the sustainability of a facility. Equipment needs to be properly maintained, user-fees collected, and hygiene behaviours changed, often involving difficult cultural adjustment.

Nevertheless, community-level water and sanitation projects in both rural and urban areas have a consistent record of success, in painful contrast to the history of large municipal programmes of both public and private sectors. Whilst it is difficult to convert small-scale developments into national programmes, the improved understanding of their rights to safe water amongst the beneficiaries could translate into wider citizenship movements to bring local and national governments to account.
A Finite Resource

Carrying water in Niger © Josh Estey/CARE 2001 / CARE USA

Human consumption is obliged to share its demands for freshwater supplies with the needs of agriculture and industry. Even if the donor community met all the funding demands of international NGOs for water and sanitation, the MDG targets could still fail through inadequate integration with the bigger water picture. This integration is not limited to understanding these other users; it must extend geographically across separate but inter-related watersheds and rivers, across national boundaries and oceans. Water presents a global challenge of unfathomable difficulty.

To borrow popular business jargon, water is a “zero sum game”. It is a finite resource over which competing interests are condemned to squabble. And in an unfair world, its beneficence is distributed by nature unevenly. Water scarcity describes an environment in which demands for water for domestic, agriculture, and industry purposes exceed its availability. The significance of water scarcity for the MDGs is that poor people tend to lose out in competition for scarce resources, typically through the pricing mechanism. All projections suggest that, under pressure from rapidly rising populations and continued global demand for meat production, water scarcity will deteriorate significantly in the period covered by the MDGs. Those who applaud the world's achievement of expanding food production exponentially over the last generation tend to forget the parallel demands placed on water resources which themselves are finite. Western diet is seen as an obstacle to world hunger and the water MDGs.

Treated wastewater for plants © International Development Research Centre

Water demand management is the opposite side of the water scarcity coin. Nowhere is the need for demand management more acute than the Middle East. In addition to educational programmes for raising awareness of water conservation, wise and efficient water use measures embrace water pricing, pollution prevention, and recycled wastewater.

The ultimate irony of water management in the 21st century is the increasing interest in restoration of traditional storage technologies, many of them dating from antiquity. A number of Indian states now insist that new buildings be fitted with rainwater harvesting equipment.
Climate Change

Glacial lake, Bhutan © Piet van der Poel

The 2007 Report “Impacts, Adaptations and Vulnerability” of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) brings home the nightmare prospect that climate change could unravel the assumptions underpinning almost every drinking water development project. Changing monsoon patterns could disrupt tiny village-level systems whilst the potential impact on the flow of the River Ganges caused by retreating Himalayan glaciers could unhinge India’s ambitious $200 billion river-linking project.

Too often associated only with rising levels of saltwater and extremes of weather, climate change could fundamentally alter the delicate ecology of the water cycle, with devastating impact on freshwater dependence. The IPCC Report suggests that as early as 2020, 75-250 million people in Africa could experience increased water stress. Failure to synchronise the planet’s freshwater resources with the demands of humanity may be the crisis that finally spurs governments into decisive action on climate change.



This Guide has been compiled primarily by reference to the OneWorld archive of water and sanitation articles and to an earlier version of the OneWorld Water and Sanitation Guide first published in 2003 with material provided by Volunteer Editors John Ebire and Ruba Al-Zubi.

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