10 November 2006
(Page 3 of 3)
And then finally, we say that we need a global action plan – that you can't leave this to individual governments to resolve, because the problem is too big, and you can't assume the individual aid donors that you've got in-county are going to provide the critical mass of support. So, the same way that we have a global strategy for HIV/Aids, we argue that you need one for water and sanitation.
A big part of what we're arguing for in the report is for the G8, the World Bank, the IMF to take up this idea of a global action plan for water and sanitation, which I think would make a real difference in Africa. That's the prescriptive side on that story.
On the livelihoods part, we back the argument of the Africa Commission on Water that there does need to be more irrigation capacity in Africa. That's really critical; the harvesting of rainfall and all of those sorts of things really matter. But if you go down that road, you need to make sure that it is small farmers who benefit, not large foreign investors. Unfortunately, what we've been seeing, certainly in parts of west Africa, in cases that we document, it is big foreign investors who are benefiting from this very limited irrigation.
We also have a case study from Tanzania – an example of where you've got small farmers downstream – small pastoral farmers, but also rain-fed and river-fed agricultural producers – and you've had large enterprises locating themselves upstream and using huge amounts of water, either for the production of power or for the production of export commodities.
That's diverted water from downstream users. The problem is that national authorities have acknowledged the rights of private investors upstream, but they don't acknowledge the rights of small producers downstream, often because these people aren't claiming private property rights. They're using shared environmental water resources, which you can't put a property title on.
So one of the critical questions for the future is how African governments manage that tension.
We looked at ways in which private companies can make it easier for small communities to get access to water. It's not strictly speaking micro finance, but there payment systems where you can reduce the upfront cost of connecting, or can find ways of doing the connections which are cheaper for people in slums than they are for people in high income areas.
It's a really important area. There are some people, I guess especially in the NGO community, saying that you can't talk about water markets, that water is a human right, and you shouldn't talk about it like a commodity. To which my answer is, fine, but in the real world, most people are operating in water markets.
The real question is how can you make these markets work for people? Because at the moment you've got a market which is great for rich people – it provides them with cheap, affordable, subsidized good quality water – but is a disaster for poor people. Part of the way you change that market is structure. Regulation has to be part of it, but introducing more competitive structures is really, really important.
You ask about what a post-conflict country, such as Liberia, can do with so little resources. Every country is different, but I would say they should pass a water law, which says that our ambition is to establish water as a right of citizenship for every Liberian and set clearly defined targets, year by year, for how to move towards this goal – and under this law, require any water provider, whether public or private, to report publicly on the progress they are achieving towards this goal. Have a regulatory body, which is politically independent, that will monitor these guys and will report publicly to the country as a whole on what they're doing.
Secondly, prioritize this in the National Poverty Reduction Strategy and try to move towards this one per cent of GDP target.
Thirdly, call on the country's donors to really get behind the national plan of action. This is really where a global plan of action would kick in, because the problem in Liberia is that you don't have a critical mass of donors who are prioritizing water and sanitation.
The way aid is negotiated is at a country level; you do it with a consultative group. So even if President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf comes up with the best plan in the world and her donors say they'd like to do something to help, if they're not from countries that are prioritizing water and sanitation themselves, she needs a facility that she can go to, where she say, 'Look, we're all committed to the Millennium Development Goals. You ask me to achieve these targets; you tell me it's a partnership; now where do I go?'
Unlike HIV/Aids, where she could go to the Global Fund, or unlike education where she could knock on the door of the World Bank and say, "We want entry to the fast track initiative", you've got no where to go on water. So I think throwing her weight behind the global action plan would be a third priority.
I've worked on Africa a lot, but I've never really worked on water before. You go through these research exercises and you read 500 ultra-boring UN reports and World Bank reports, and everything is about pricing and marginal this and that and then, when you go to Kibera, you really get it. I wish I had gone to Kibera before I had written the report. You realize that in the lives of ordinary people, it's hard to find something bigger than water.
I always used to be struck, when I worked for Oxfam and I used to go to villages in Zambia or Tanzania, that people have this sort of primordial drive to get their kids into school. Similarly, you can try to explain the need for clean water to people in Britain, and they sort of look at you. You talk to people who have lost kids to diarrhea – I mean this is the twenty-first century. This is so wrong, and yet it doesn't even figure on the national political agenda in most countries. At the international level, it's not even a blip on the radar. To me, that's just extraordinary.
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