10 November 2006
interview
Washington, DC — Kevin Watkins, the lead author of the UN Human Development Report and head of the office that produces it, visited AllAfrica recently to discuss this year's document. Released on November 9, the 2006 report notes that the average person in the UK or the USA flushes 50 litres of water down the toilet daily, while as little as 20 litres of clean water a day can save millions of lives and promote economic development. Excerpts from the conversation:
I think scarcity is a loaded concept when you apply it to water. If you look at water availability in Africa as a region, there is not a scarcity of water. The problem is when you start disaggregating the region. Africa's water is very heavily concentrated in a few countries, in a few places - often places where there are not many people - so there is a mismatch between where water is and where people are.
Discounting regions that are acutely drought prone - parts of the Sahel and northeast Kenya and so on – the real issue of scarcity in most of sub-Saharan Africa, we would argue, is a product of governance and how water is managed. Take Nairobi as a classic example. About 700,000 people live in an area called Kibera.
Clean water is acutely scarce. There is a child death rate something like seven times the Kenyan average because of water-related infectious disease - mostly diarrhea. Water is very expensive for people who live in Kibera. In fact, the per-unit cost of water is higher than it is in New York or London. So you could infer from that that Nairobi is a city where water is scarce.
But over the main road from Kibera, you have the Royal Nairobi Golf Course, which has the sprinklers operating on a 12-hour-a-day basis. Right next to the seventh green, you have [former Kenyan President Daniel] Arap Moi's house, which has a swimming pool and a very green lawn. So water is very scarce for some people in Nairobi but is very abundant for other people.
What we are trying to look at in this report is the politics of scarcity. Why is water scarce for some people and not for other people? There is a scarcity issue at a household level – but that is structured scarcity, and it is politically structured. It reflects decisions on investment and about how you govern the resource.
Part of the report looks at water for livelihoods. Water is a productive resource. Africa is in a different position than most other developing regions, because it has very limited water infrastructure. Probably 90 per cent-plus of African producers rely on rain-fed agriculture. So, as a region, Africa has got something like one to two per cent of global irrigation capacity. That means that the region is very highly dependent on rainfall, which is variable. It is that variability that makes agricultural production in Africa such a risky activity – and why you find such high levels of poverty relative to rural areas in south Asia, where they have irrigation.
There are obviously difficult questions around the irrigation issue. If you create irrigation resources, who gets access to them and who doesn't? We actually try to show, in the report, that in the parts of the Sahel where they have introduced irrigation, the access is being distributed in a very unequal way. So again, there is the question of structured scarcity - some people get it, and some people don't.
We are trying to sort of politicize the idea of scarcity. Too often people write about water problems as if this is somehow a natural or physical outcome. What we are trying to say that it is not a physical outcome, but it is a political outcome. You need to understand the politics of it, and that is what we are really trying to focus on.
Women, Water and Development
A big part of what we do in the report is sorting out what the problem is. We commissioned a study, which we did with the World Health Organization, trying to understand the real public health outcomes from the water crisis in Africa. The headline number that comes out is: globally there are roughly two million child deaths as a result of not having access to clean water. And Africa is hugely over represented in that number. It accounts for something like a third or more, roughly 40% of total child deaths from water-related problems. That is a health outcome.
There is a parallel outcome, which is the impact of all of this on economic growth, and how that relates to investment in areas like public health and education. We estimate that the African region loses five per cent of GDP annually as a result of both women having to walk huge distances to collect water - which diverts labor, apart from the huge personal cost that it puts someone in - and the impact of disease on productivity.
And five per cent of GDP is a lot of GDP. It is more than Africa gets in aid! There are more people campaigning on aid and debt relief, but this problem dwarfs what goes into Africa through aid and debt relief. The real burden, when you get down to the household level, is uses of women's time. And I think that people do not understand the problem, to be honest.
In Kibera, you see these little kids, young girls, carrying 20 liter buckets of water. This is more than half of their body weight. Walking for more than an hour in rural areas is even worse.
The minimum amount of water that people need, and what we argue in the report, is 20 liters daily. We say 20 liters should be a right of citizenship. In rural villages in parts of east Africa, and even in urban areas, and people are using 9 or 10 liters of water a day.
Now if you have sick person in the house, and you have nine liters of water a day for cooking, for washing, for drinking, it's impossible to meet basic public health standards, apart from the huge costs in terms of children who get infected with unclean water. Actually, what we say in the report is that there's a lot of thinking that's going on about immunization – and of course that's critical – but, actually, the most effective vaccine that you can give against child death in Africa is a glass of clean water.
Public versus Private Water
It's a huge explosive issue in most countries. We come out in an aggressively agnostic position. Which is to say that for most poor people in most of Africa, this debate is totally irrelevant.
Most people in Africa are operating in totally privatized water markets – most poor people, I mean – regardless of what the formal water system. You've got 700,000 people in Kibera who are operating in a total free market for water. They get out of bed in the morning; they take their money to the water kiosk; they buy their water; they go home.
Arap Moi ought to have a big interest in whether the water utility is public or private, because he's getting cheap water. But for people in Kibera, this is a different story.
Africa has one of the lowest connection rates. It's about 40 per cent, officially, who don't have access to piped water or an improved water source. We say that the real figure is way, way higher than that. The other thing that we do, which is even more interesting in some ways, is we've got the national breakdown of who's got access to water and who doesn't. Then we've used micro-level household data for differentiating between the richest 20 per cent and the poorest 20 per cent, and some of those figures are very ugly for Africa. For example, in Ghana connection rate for the richest 20 per cent is something like 85 per cent-plus. For the poorest 20 per cent it is something like 10 per cent-minus, which comes back to the realities of these poor people who are in the water market, which is not connected to the utility.
Climate Change – a Predictable Disaster
We've got a very strong environmental- change, global-warming story on sub-Saharan Africa in the report. We've looked at the implications for the production of food staples of shifting climatic patterns, and I think that's a pretty disturbing story that the international community needs to take a lot more seriously then they have.
I'm sure everybody's aware that climate change is already affecting weather patterns all across Africa. It probably started in the Sahel in the 70's and 80's, and we see it now in Ethiopia and north-east Kenya and parts of southern Africa. So the first thing that people need to understand, which most people don't – people think of global warming as something that's going to really hit us in fifty years time, and, actually, this already happening to a lot of people.
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