Water and Sanitation guide
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| India Mark1 © Centre for Science and Environment |
The achievement of providing 1.6 billion people with access to safe drinking water since 1990 is potentially jeopardised by the absence of matching investment in sanitation. The lack of hygienic facilities experienced by 2.5 billion people is a fundamental cause of disease which leads to 1.5 million deaths of children each year. Climate change uncertainties cast a menacing shadow over the efforts of developing countries to honour their citizens’ rights to safe water and sanitation.
updated November 2009
Millennium Development Goals and Water and Sanitation
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 one kilometre.
Water and sanitation data is published by the UN every two years. The most recent report in 2008 aggregated data from household budget and other surveys collected during 2006. Reasonable consistency between countries is achieved by structuring questions in line with advice from the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation, the official UN mechanism for assessing progress.
Whilst 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%. The total number of people without access to safe water fell below 900 million and, in urban areas, coverage is 95%.
There are however major reservations about these headline figures. They conceal the disappointing situation in sub-Saharan Africa where only 58% of the population had satisfactory access in 2006. The rate of progress is such that the MDG target of 75% will not be reached until 2035. Even in a politically stable and aid-friendly country such as Tanzania, access to drinking water has been in decline in recent years.
This example hints at an underlying concern about the sustainability of progress that has been achieved. Threats include the introduction or increase in charges for poor households, chemical pollution (as experienced in China) or natural contamination (such as the arsenic crisis in parts of South Asia).
Climate Change and Water
Climate change poses a far more serious threat to progress than quality or affordability. In 2009 the World Bank published its estimate that costs for developing countries for water-related climate adaptation, excluding coastal protection, will fall between $14-$19 billion per annum. Such an investment is not yet remotely contemplated by the international community.
The impact of global warming on the planet’s hydrological cycle will derive from two principal sources; firstly the accelerated thawing of glaciers and snow and, secondly, the disturbance to patterns of rainfall.
The reduction in water availability caused by retreating Himalayan glaciers is possibly the impact which carries the greatest risk to the greatest number of people. Changes in rainfall will cause some regions to be wetter and some to be drier; unfortunately the “losers” from this transformation will be the poorer countries. Over one billion people already live in regions classed as arid or semi-arid.
Inexact resolution of climate prediction models on the scale of human habitations impedes adaptation plans. This will be especially true of those countries which already struggle to provide sufficient access to safe drinking water. In the short term, the best defence against climate change will be to accelerate the provision of institutional capacity for effective delivery of drinking water programmes. 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 Sanitation Deficit
Regrettably, questions about the sanitation MDG 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. 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 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. About half of the population of South Asia continues to suffer the indignity of open defecation.
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 familiar statement that diarrhoea is caused by drinking contaminated water presents an incomplete picture. More attention is now given to the link with unsafe sanitation and poor hygiene practices which ultimately are a major contributor to child mortality.
Within village projects too there has been much greater determination to overcome years of failure to convince households of the value of safe sanitation and improved hygiene. Offering government subsidies for latrine construction has been notoriously unsuccessful. More promising results have recently been achieved in an approach known as “community-led sanitation” which promotes behaviour change through peer group condemnation of open defecation as an anti-social habit.
Costs and Benefits of Water and Sanitation
An important output of this new emphasis has been the calculation that sanitation projects deliver highly impressive economic returns. Taking into account lower healthcare costs, less disruption to schooling and work attendance, each $1 of investment yields a $9 return.
This result reinforces the 2006 UN Human Development Report which estimated that failure to invest in water and sanitation was costing sub-Saharan Africa $28.4 billion per annum, about 5% of GDP. This compares with the relatively modest estimate of $10 billion per annum to achieve the sanitation MDG target for all developing countries.
Potential financial returns of this order would provoke frenzy within private capital markets. Most donor countries have however failed to respond to the incentive. Although the share of total foreign aid dedicated to water and sanitation has risen in recent years, it amounted only to $6.3 billion in 2006. This represented 6% of all development aid, with less than a quarter allocated to the Least Developed Countries.
Campaigners attribute this lethargy to a lack of global coordination or encouragement of focused national plans. They favour a “global framework for action” similar to that adopted for the fight against HIV/AIDS.
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. Schools without toilets for girls, as is the situation in 50% of all schools in India, discourage attendance.
Critical MDG targets for child mortality, gender equity, enrolment in education, and extreme poverty may therefore be at risk without success in water and sanitation.
The Right to Water and Sanitation
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 and its relevant legal embodiment, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. In 2002, the UN committee responsible for interpreting the Covenant ruled that the right to water should be included within its scope.
The technical significance of this move appears to have fallen short of positioning the right to water within international law. As recently as March 2009, at the World Water Forum, a group of countries led by US and China insisted on the removal of rights-based text from the declaration. Other countries have recognised the right to water in their constitutions, notably South Africa and Uruguay.
The right to safe sanitation has not formed part of this debate but an alternative pragmatic approach has been articulated by Catarina de Albuquerque, the UN Independent Expert on human rights, water and sanitation. She has pointed out that “those who do not have access to adequate sanitation will not be served by years of political negotiations over a new international treaty.”
Greater emphasis on water as a right rather than a commodity might however have avoided years of confrontation over the privatisation of municipal water supplies in developing countries. A fundamental flaw undermined this neo-liberal dogma. Areas most in need of new public supplies tend to be unplanned peri-urban settlements dominated by poor households. By contrast a commercial supplier prefers to prioritise middle class households where cost recovery is relatively predictable and untroubled. This mismatch led to many failures of private capital and consensus is emerging that an element of public ownership of urban water services is essential in all but the richest economies.
A rights perspective also illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of the MDG programme. The introduction of quantifiable targets for the provision of water and sanitation represented a step forward in aligning development projects with individual rights. But the absence of any long term goal of universal access denies the rights of 1.8 billion people who will remain without sanitation, and 800 million people without drinking water, even if the MDG targets are met in 2015.
Governance Issues in Water and Sanitation
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. Budgets are typically less than 0.5% of GDP and coordination between ministries poor.
There is a deeper problem than shortage of finance. The Global Corruption Report 2008 published by Transparency International warns that “corruption in the water sector is a root cause and catalyst for the global water crisis.” It traces how funds are diverted at every level of project implementation 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. The Report claims that 25% of vital irrigation funds in India are lost.
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. 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 Scarcity
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 drinking 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 these 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, more extravagant lifestyles, intensive agriculture and industrialisation, water presents a most formidable global challenge.
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. Projections suggest that 1.8 billion people will live in regions classed as water scarce by 2025.
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. Agriculture now consumes 70% of global freshwater supplies. In India, 20% of freshwater use is extracted from non-renewable aquifers and groundwater tables are falling dramatically, a reminder that climate change is not the only cause of water scarcity. Major rivers such as the Colorado and Murray-Darling no longer flow into the sea. Others are ruined by pollution, including over 50% of the rivers in China.
The concept of “virtual water” has been developed to rationalise the hidden consumption within everyday products and crops such as cotton, rice, coffee and sugar. For example, production of one cotton shirt requires 2700 litres of water compared with average daily personal use of 150 litres in Europe.
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, where Yemen is regarded as the most water scarce country in the world. Measures found across the region include awareness programmes, 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.
|
| Somali woman collects water © Rachel Stabb / Oxfam Great Britain |
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 one kilometre.
Water and sanitation data is published by the UN every two years. The most recent report in 2008 aggregated data from household budget and other surveys collected during 2006. Reasonable consistency between countries is achieved by structuring questions in line with advice from the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation, the official UN mechanism for assessing progress.
Whilst 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%. The total number of people without access to safe water fell below 900 million and, in urban areas, coverage is 95%.
|
| Carrying water in Niger © Josh Estey/CARE 2001 / CARE USA |
This example hints at an underlying concern about the sustainability of progress that has been achieved. Threats include the introduction or increase in charges for poor households, chemical pollution (as experienced in China) or natural contamination (such as the arsenic crisis in parts of South Asia).
Climate Change and Water
Climate change poses a far more serious threat to progress than quality or affordability. In 2009 the World Bank published its estimate that costs for developing countries for water-related climate adaptation, excluding coastal protection, will fall between $14-$19 billion per annum. Such an investment is not yet remotely contemplated by the international community.
The impact of global warming on the planet’s hydrological cycle will derive from two principal sources; firstly the accelerated thawing of glaciers and snow and, secondly, the disturbance to patterns of rainfall.
|
| Glacial lake, Bhutan © Piet van der Poel |
Inexact resolution of climate prediction models on the scale of human habitations impedes adaptation plans. This will be especially true of those countries which already struggle to provide sufficient access to safe drinking water. In the short term, the best defence against climate change will be to accelerate the provision of institutional capacity for effective delivery of drinking water programmes. 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 Sanitation Deficit
|
| Shelters at Akkaraipettai lack sanitation © Shivani Chaudhry |
Development agencies must accept some responsibility, their publicity cameras preferring to linger on happy children working the pump handle. 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 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. About half of the population of South Asia continues to suffer the indignity of open defecation.
|
Within village projects too there has been much greater determination to overcome years of failure to convince households of the value of safe sanitation and improved hygiene. Offering government subsidies for latrine construction has been notoriously unsuccessful. More promising results have recently been achieved in an approach known as “community-led sanitation” which promotes behaviour change through peer group condemnation of open defecation as an anti-social habit.
Costs and Benefits of Water and Sanitation
|
| Risky sanitation for children in Nepal © Mark Naftalin |
This result reinforces the 2006 UN Human Development Report which estimated that failure to invest in water and sanitation was costing sub-Saharan Africa $28.4 billion per annum, about 5% of GDP. This compares with the relatively modest estimate of $10 billion per annum to achieve the sanitation MDG target for all developing countries.
Potential financial returns of this order would provoke frenzy within private capital markets. Most donor countries have however failed to respond to the incentive. Although the share of total foreign aid dedicated to water and sanitation has risen in recent years, it amounted only to $6.3 billion in 2006. This represented 6% of all development aid, with less than a quarter allocated to the Least Developed Countries.
Campaigners attribute this lethargy to a lack of global coordination or encouragement of focused national plans. They favour a “global framework for action” similar to that adopted for the fight against HIV/AIDS.
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. Schools without toilets for girls, as is the situation in 50% of all schools in India, discourage attendance.
Critical MDG targets for child mortality, gender equity, enrolment in education, and extreme poverty may therefore be at risk without success in water and sanitation.
The Right to Water and Sanitation
|
| Collecting water in Chennai © Peter Armstrong |
The technical significance of this move appears to have fallen short of positioning the right to water within international law. As recently as March 2009, at the World Water Forum, a group of countries led by US and China insisted on the removal of rights-based text from the declaration. Other countries have recognised the right to water in their constitutions, notably South Africa and Uruguay.
The right to safe sanitation has not formed part of this debate but an alternative pragmatic approach has been articulated by Catarina de Albuquerque, the UN Independent Expert on human rights, water and sanitation. She has pointed out that “those who do not have access to adequate sanitation will not be served by years of political negotiations over a new international treaty.”
|
| Water privatisation protest in Bolivia © Julie Plasencia / AP / The UNESCO Courier |
A rights perspective also illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of the MDG programme. The introduction of quantifiable targets for the provision of water and sanitation represented a step forward in aligning development projects with individual rights. But the absence of any long term goal of universal access denies the rights of 1.8 billion people who will remain without sanitation, and 800 million people without drinking water, even if the MDG targets are met in 2015.
Governance Issues in Water and Sanitation
|
| Waiting for water © Catholic Relief Services |
There is a deeper problem than shortage of finance. The Global Corruption Report 2008 published by Transparency International warns that “corruption in the water sector is a root cause and catalyst for the global water crisis.” It traces how funds are diverted at every level of project implementation 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. The Report claims that 25% of vital irrigation funds in India are lost.
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. 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 Scarcity
|
| Treated wastewater for plants © International Development Research Centre |
“Integrated water resources management” (IWRM) is not limited to understanding the needs of these 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, more extravagant lifestyles, intensive agriculture and industrialisation, water presents a most formidable global challenge.
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. Projections suggest that 1.8 billion people will live in regions classed as water scarce by 2025.
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. Agriculture now consumes 70% of global freshwater supplies. In India, 20% of freshwater use is extracted from non-renewable aquifers and groundwater tables are falling dramatically, a reminder that climate change is not the only cause of water scarcity. Major rivers such as the Colorado and Murray-Darling no longer flow into the sea. Others are ruined by pollution, including over 50% of the rivers in China.
|
| Virtual water in cotton from Mali © Betty Press/Panos |
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, where Yemen is regarded as the most water scarce country in the world. Measures found across the region include awareness programmes, 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.
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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!
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