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AFRICA: Region lacks capacity to meet water MDG

09 Nov 2006 16:39:34 GMT
Source: IRIN

JOHANNESBURG, 9 November (IRIN) - Africa lacks the capacity to meet the United Nations' Millennium Development Goal to halve the number of the people without access to safe drinking water and sanitation by 2015, said a global water body official.

"It is not a matter of funds, it is the lack of capacity to absorb the money and translate it into action," commented Paul van Hofwegen, director of programmes at the World Water Council, a France-based water policy think-tank comprising government and nongovernmental organisations. "Many countries lack decentralised systems to manage infrastructure to distribute essential services like water. Some countries do not even have strong local government systems in place, which is essential for the provision of basic services."

With less than 10 years to go before the 2015 deadline for the MDGs is reached, "the challenge of accelerating progress takes on a new urgency", warned the UN Development Programme's Human Development Report 2006, released on Thursday. The report, 'Beyond capacity: Power, politics and global water crisis', identifies universal access to water as one of the greatest development challenges this century.

The report also acknowledges the lack of human capacity as a major drawback. Poor governance in Malawi's water sector, linked to weak capacity, has led donors to set up parallel systems operating independently of government programmes. Malawi's Ministry of Water Development controls less than 12 percent of the development budget, while donors administer the balance through their own programmes, the UNDP report said.

Lack of capacity can even affect the provision of essential services by decentralised government systems, as in Ethiopia, although human capacity has also been weakened by the lack of legal recognition of village water supply and sanitation committees.

However, Bethan Emmett, policy advisor at Oxfam, the UK-based development agency, said Africa could still meet the water and sanitation MDG. "What is needed is public commitment and sustained public investment in rural and urban water provision." She cited Uganda, Botswana and Ghana, which have managed to make significant progress towards achieving the water MDG, as examples.

Uganda has been a world leader in reforming the water sector because of its political commitment and decentralising the management of its water resources to district-level bodies, according to the UNDP report. In its 1999 water policy, Uganda aimed for 100 percent coverage by 2015. Budget allocations for water management were increased from 0.5 percent of public expenditure in 1997 to 2.8 percent in 2002. Water coverage levels have increased from 39 percent in 1996 to 51 percent in 2003, meaning an additional 5.3 million people had access to safe water in 2003, most of them in rural areas.

The Botswana government invested in a major programme of ground water drilling and water network construction soon after independence in 1966, achieving near-universal access to safe water by the 1990s, said a joint Oxfam and Wateraid report on strengthening public services to meet the MDGs. Rural households in Botswana were subsidised to build latrines and the government invested in health and hygiene education programmes.

Meeting the water and sanitation MDG is critical, as it impacts on the region's progress towards several other UN targets, such as reducing child deaths by two-thirds. Diseases like diarrhoea, caused by unclean water and poor sanitation, claim the lives of 1.8 million children under the age of five each year, the UNDP report pointed out. "The number of deaths associated with the twin threats of unclean water and poor sanitation is not widely appreciated. Globally, diarrhoea kills more people than tuberculosis or malaria - five times as many children die of diarrhoea as of HIV/AIDS."

Universal access to water will help reduce the financial burden on Africa's health systems by US$610 million annually, or about 7 percent of the region's yearly health budget.

Accessibility and affordability are two critical issues in meeting the water MDG. About 314 million people in sub-Saharan Africa do not have access to safe drinking water, and most of them live on less than $2 a day. "Increasing access will help reduce the costs," said van Hofwegen.

The UNDP report recommends that countries spend more money on improving access to water through standpipes, wells and boreholes, and developing and expanding a regulatory framework for managing water. It does not take sides on the public-versus-private utility debate; instead, the report proposes the creation of an independent regulator to oversee water providers to ensure that the poor are served.

"Privatising water utilities tends to result in price hikes which exclude poor people from piped networks, leaving them dependent on small and informal water vendors where quality is low and price per litre is even higher - the situation in most African cities at the moment," said Emmett, an advocate of building strong public water systems. The UNDP report noted that people living in the slums of Nairobi paid five to 10 times more per litre of water than wealthy people living in the same city.

According to van Hofwegen, it is a question of striking a balance between cross-subsidies by the rich, the state and even international aid agencies. "South Africa, which provides a minimum of 25 litres of clean water free of charge each day, can afford to do so because it is rich. Cross-subsidies in Jakarta, Indonesia, which required the rich to pay a solidarity tax to compensate for the poor residents, became too much of a burden and the wealthy decided to build their own water system by cutting off the poor altogether."

International solidarity subsidies provided by the municipalities of wealthier cities in the North to their counterparts in the developing world are another way forward, van Hofwegen added.

Global disparities in access to clean water are more evident, and ironic in the consumption of bottled mineral water in the developed world, according to the UNDP report. The 25 billion litres of bottled water consumed annually by US households exceeds the entire clean water consumption of the 2.7 million people in Senegal lacking access to an improved water source. Germans and Italians between them consume enough bottled water to cover the basic needs of more than 3 million people in Burkina Faso for cooking, washing and other domestic purposes.

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