Millennium Development Goals and Water and Sanitation

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". A source which separates the delivery of drinking water from potential contamination, such as a piped supply or a protected well or spring, is deemed to be “safe”. Interpretation of “access” has varied between countries but generally refers to a household supply of 20 litres that can be fetched within a 30 minute round trip, a distance of about 1 km. Whilst therefore modest in ambition, the drinking water target is one of the few success stories of the MDG programme. Aggregate global coverage has advanced from 77% to 87% between 1990 and 2006, not far short of the 2015 target of 89% and bringing down the total number of people without access to less than 900 million. In urban areas, coverage is over 95%.

There are however two major reservations about these headline figures. Firstly that they conceal the disappointing situation in sub-Saharan Africa where only 58% of the population had satisfactory access in 2006 and where the rate of progress is such that the MDG target of 75% will not be reached until 2035. Secondly there are worries about the sustainability of progress that has been achieved. Will supplies remain affordable or free for poor households? Can quality thresholds survive the threat of chemical pollution (as experienced in China) or natural contamination (such as the arsenic crisis in parts of South Asia)? And can drinking water sources be adapted to the impact of climate change?

The Sanitation Deficit

Shelters at Akkaraipettai lack sanitation © Shivani Chaudhry

Regrettably, questions about the sanitation target are more concerned with the absence of progress than its sustainability. Defined as a facility which removes excreta from the risk of human contact, “safe” sanitation encompasses covered pit latrines as well as flush toilets. Since its belated addition to the MDGs in 2002, the sanitation target has been the Cinderella of the cause, attracting little over 10% of funds available for water and sanitation programmes. Development agencies must accept some responsibility, their publicity cameras preferring to linger on happy children working the pump handle, drops of water glistening in sunlight. Latrines offer less inspiring images and copy. Even the UN’s declaration of the period 2005-2015 as the “International Decade for Action - Water for Life” betrayed neglect of sanitation, in presentation if not intent.

The consequence is that 18% of the world’s population – including half of the population of South Asia – continues to suffer the indignity of open defecation, mostly in rural areas. Global access to safe sanitation increased only from 54% to 62% in the period 1990-2006, leaving 2.5 billion people without access, a figure which has barely changed in recent years. In sub-Saharan Africa progress from 26% to 31% extrapolates to arrive at the target sometime during the 22nd century.
The Benefits of Water and Sanitation

Risky sanitation for children in Nepal © Mark Naftalin

The development industry has recently taken great strides to redress its lopsided focus on drinking water. The UN corrected its earlier omission by proclaiming 2008 as the Year of Sanitation and the development agencies have overhauled their presentations. For example, the suggestion that diarrhoea is caused by drinking contaminated water presents an incomplete picture and more attention is now given to the link with unsafe sanitation and poor hygiene practices which ultimately are a major contributor to child mortality. The specialist international agency, WaterAid, has been referring to “sanitation and water” in its communications, inverting the more familiar phrase.

A further important output of this fresh approach has been the calculation that sanitation projects deliver highly impressive economic returns of $9 for each $1 of investment, thanks to lower healthcare costs and less disruption to school and work attendance. Cost/benefit analysis does no more than reproduce in financial language what development professionals have been saying for years - that provision of safe water and sanitation is the foundation of human and economic development in poor communities. Distant or overcrowded access condemns women and children to spend hours in water collection; time that could instead be utilised for income generation and education, especially for female children. Critical MDG targets for child mortality, gender equity, enrolment in education, and extreme poverty may be at risk without success in water and sanitation.
The Right to Water and Sanitation

Collecting water in Chennai © Peter Armstrong

A separate dimension of advocacy centres on the concept of water as a human right, this being omitted from the original Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In 2002, the UN Committee on Economic, Cultural and Social Rights approved a “General Comment” which recognises water and sanitation as a human right, but this articulates a goal for signatory countries rather than a universal legal obligation. Whilst a small number of countries have amended their constitutions, efforts to upgrade the status of water and sanitation through the UN Human Rights Council have failed so far to attract sufficient support.
Water and Sanitation in Global Politics

The combined pressure of powerful rights-based advocacy, favourable cost/benefit analysis, and the International Year of Sanitation has not yet generated the desired sense of urgency. The NGO community was frustrated by the timid approach of the G8 summit in Japan and at the relative neglect of water and sanitation issues at the 2008 UN High-level meeting to review MDG progress.

A stimulus was certainly provided by the UN Human Development Report (HDR) for 2006, Beyond Scarcity: Power, poverty and the global water crisis. In an unusually hard-hitting analysis, the Report asserts that the water crisis "reinforces the obscene inequalities in life chances that divide rich and poor nations" and laments the absence of any clear global plan for achieving the water and sanitation targets, nor sufficiently detailed national strategies. It also calls on rich countries to reverse the falling share of total foreign aid dedicated to water and sanitation - $6.3 billion in 2006 represented about 6% of all development aid, with less than a quarter allocated to the Least Developed Countries (LDCs). The cost of achieving the sanitation MDG target has been put at $10 billion pa, a rate comparable to the level of current aid for the fight against HIV/AIDS - which causes far fewer deaths than unsafe water and sanitation.

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

Beyond the absolute level of aid, concern also focuses on conditions imposed by donors especially in relation to privatisation of municipal water supplies. 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. In mushrooming cities where rapid population movement often defies formal registration by the authorities, an international utility corporation will tend to target its services to middle class areas and set prices beyond the pockets of the poor. There are signs that some donor governments and even the World Bank may be pulling back from their unquestioning stance on water privatisation. Nevertheless, controversies are rumbling on in many major cities of the world, provoked on occasion by extreme proposals to sell the rights to entire rivers and lakes to the private sector.
Local Governance of Water and Sanitation

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 reduction plans. Of particular importance is the need to strengthen local government capacity to deliver infrastructure projects and to ensure that decentralisation strategies are delivered. A 2008 report by WaterAid suggests that a combination of corruption and overlapping responsibilities diverts funds away from local government so that the proportion of aid actually invested in water and sanitation programmes is alarmingly low. In urban projects, petty corruption is notorious for forcing up water charges.

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 local ownership. 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.
Water is a Finite Resource

Cattle herding, Tajikistan © Paulita Sedgwick

Water scarcity describes an environment in which demands for water for domestic, agriculture, and industry purposes exceed its availability. Even if the donor community met all the funding demands of international NGOs for access to safe water, the MDG targets could still fail through inadequate integration with the bigger water picture. “Integrated water resources management” (IWRM) is not limited to understanding the needs of the three user categories; it must extend geographically across separate but inter-related watersheds and rivers, across national boundaries and oceans. Under pressure from rising populations, intensive agriculture and industrialisation, water presents a global challenge of unfathomable difficulty.

To borrow popular business jargon, freshwater 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. 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. 1.4 billion people already live in regions classed as water scarce and all projections suggest that this figure will rise sharply.

Virtual water in cotton from Mali © Betty Press/Panos

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. Meat consumption generates great demand for water as does the new enthusiasm for biofuels – one litre of ethanol is produced from an amount of corn which is variously estimated to consume 1500-4000 litres of water. The concept of “virtual water” has been developed to rationalise this hidden consumption within everyday products and crops such as cotton, rice, coffee and sugar. Globalisation is moving this embedded or virtual water around the world, often from countries which can ill afford its loss. The omission of the cost of virtual water bears witness to another failure of modern market economics and, like carbon dioxide, there are moves to quantify this water footprint for labelling purposes and input to sustainability targets.

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 and Water

Glacial lake, Bhutan © Piet van der Poel

The 2008 Report "Climate Change and Water" by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) describes climate change as an “additional burden” to providing water services, rather an understatement in relation to the accompanying catalogue of potential impacts. These range from “salinisation of coastal aquifers” to “different kinds of pollutants” introduced by floods. The reduction in water availability caused by retreating Himalayan glaciers is possibly the impact on freshwater which carries the greatest risk to the greatest number of people. A long list of adaptation strategies in the IPCC report concludes with a brief recognition that developing countries cannot possibly afford them and may have to resort to “unsustainable practices such as increasing groundwater over-exploitation”.

It is clear that climate change could fundamentally alter the delicate ecology of the water cycle, with devastating impact on freshwater dependence. 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.


The OneWorld Water and Sanitation Guide first published in 2003 with material provided by Volunteer Editors John Ebire and Ruba Al-Zubi.

Help us to complete OneWorld Guides
Many important development issues are missing from our range of Guides. OneWorld wants to fill these gaps as part of our efforts to improve understanding of the issues faced by developing countries. We receive no funding for the production of our educational resources. Every small contribution helps!